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THE EEJECTED STONE: 



OR 



INSURRECTION vs. RESURRECTION 



AME RI C 




BY A NATIVE Of VIEGINM, 




y^ 9 







' BOSTON: 

WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 

245 Washington Street. 

18 6 1. 

-In 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by 

WALKER, WISE, AND COMPANY, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



"2^ 6 11^ i, 



University Press, Cambridge : 
Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company. 



CONTENTS 



Page 

I. Union 7 

11. Unmask! 9 

III. Pilate 14 

IV. Between us be Truth ! 15 

V. The Organic Law . . . . . .19 

VI. The Eejected Stone 24 

VII. Conservation 29 

VIII. Compromise 31 

IX. Broken 43 

X. The Privateer 48 

XL A Foreign Power 50 

XII. Manasses 58 

XIII. Beth-el 68 

XIV. A Rebellion vs. A Revolution ... 75 
XV. EXCALIBUR 85 

XVI. A Felicitation 91 

XVII. To THE President of the United States . 94 

XVIII. To THE American People . . . . 113 

XIX. The Great Method of Peace . . . .117 



Lord Bacon recommends that all important affairs should 
be committed first to Argus with an hundred eyes, and after- 
ward to Briareus with an hundred arms. Things, he re- 
marks, will have their first or second agitation. If they be 
not tossed upon the arguments of counsel, they will be tossed 
upon the waves of fortune. 

The hundred arms have laid hold on the American ques- 
tion ; whether the hundred eyes have done or are doing their 
work is doubtful. 

The daily press brings to each household its presentation 
of " the situation," in a military aspect ; but the ever-develop- 
ing moral and historical situation is much neglected, or, for 
reasons of state, suppressed. 

" Make bright the arrows ! " said the Hebrew prophet. In 
this age, still more in this controversy, every weapon must 
think, every missile be winged with intelligence, every shell 
be fused with fire from God's altar. 

It is with a profound conviction that the event of this war 
is to depend more upon the impregnability of principles than 
that of fortresses, and that it must be fought from a higher 
plane than any yet occupied by our forces ere it can be 
won, that I offer the following suggestions and discussion to 
the American people. 



THE REJECTED STONE 



UNION. 

In the popular mind, the brave sufferings o£ our past, 
the fruitions of our present, and the visions of our fu- 
ture, as a people, are baptized and consecrated in the 
name of Union. The very word has thus become a 
talisman, which, because so long supposed to contain 
all the secret of our national health and wealth, has 
gained the command of all the living forces of the New 
World. The good and strong men who have arraigned 
the Union have done so critically, not virtually ; and 
now, when the question is no longer on the exegesis of 
Mr. Hamilton's or Mr. Randolph's remarks in the Con- 
vention of '87, but on the right of eminent domain in 
this country, or any portion of this country, as between 
Barbarism and Civilization, there is but one party pos- 
sible among loyal men, — that which would preserve 
the Union. 

But it must be candidly acknowledged in the outset, 
that, in the sense of the politicians, there is no Union 



8 THE REJECTED STONE. 

to be preserved. 'T is only a sad satire to call States 
"United," wherein that which is felt on one side to be 
the blot on the national escutcheon is maintained on 
the other as the governor of the national machinery. 
It is questionable whether the people mean, by their 
effort to " save the Union," the same that is meant by 
some of their proxies. Do they mean thereby the pres- 
ervation of the right at the South to imprison Northern 
seamen and landsmen, accused of no crime ? Do our 
half-million bayonets gleam to-day to defend and pre- 
serve the right to nail up Northern freemen in tar- 
barrels and roll them into the Mississippi River ? Is it, 
in short, the Union as it was, that the people have with 
one voice declared must and shall be preserved ? 

It is only a short time since compromises were pro- 
posed and seriously considered by the American peo- 
ple. They were deliberately rejected, even when the 
manifest alternative was civil war. Why rejected ? 
Our people have not been given to scruples agaihst 
compromise ; they had many interests which civil 
war would ruin. These compromises were rejected, 
and the most unimportant guaranties refused, simply 
because of the utter worthlessness of what they were 
to purchase, — i. e. the Union as then existing. The 
only promise offered in response to Northern conces- 
sion was, that things just as they were should remain 
undisturbed and immutable. But the people of this 
country had maturely decided that the present edi- 
tion of the country was not worth stereotyping. In- 



UNMASK! 9 

deed, if it were generally understood that the power 
of our Constitution naturally results or culminates in 
any one condition of things which the country has 
yet known, it is doubtful if, in the Free States, there 
would be found ten men unrighteous enough to save 
it. In fact, as far as the old Union is concerned, the 
only arms now defending it are in the South ; and 
they have reason, for it was possessed by the demon 
of the South, its proper soul drugged into torpor, sup- 
posed by many dead. 



II. 

UNMASK! 



The native glow of the human heart is always for 
Justice. Men have not paeans and hymns and cele- 
bration-days for epochs when Wrong triumphed over 
Right. So Tyranny has found it necessary to encloud 
the glow of heaven in man, which would else melt 
every chain. 

There is a legend of a youth who, at a mas- 
querade, became interested to know a certain mask. 
This one he pursued everywhere, the figure being 
equally intent on eluding him. From room to room, 
from corridor to corridor, he followed; it mounted 
1* 



10 THE REJECTED STONE. 

the stairway, his feet were swift after it: at length, 
in a deserted chamber, far away from the music and 
the dancing, he overtook and unmasked it with a kiss ; 
but what it was that turned and glared upon him he 
could never bring his pallid lips to utter, — only that 
it was a thing not of flesh and blood ! So have we 
followed the figure costumed with the stars and stripes, 
wearing the mask of Union. Far away from the mu- 
sic and the dance, into the deserted chambers we fol- 
lowed with heedless infatuation ; it is our very kiss 
that has unmasked it. God! what monster has 
been moving in our midst, and touching our hands, 
under this alluring costume ! 

Now we see tliat this Union, whatever those who 
made it meant it should be, has become the hollow 
mask of Slavery. 

The present Secretary of State, just before entering 
his office as such, said to some friends calling upon 
him, " Let every man now devote himself to saving 
the Union." — "With liberty in it," suggested one in 
the company. "Liberty is always in the Union," re- 
plied the future Premier. But so soon as he himself 
comes into the Union with a little finger of author- 
ity, held only in the name of Liberty, that Union van- 
ishes like a pricked bubble. 

At that recent period, no Union but upon a slavery 
basis, pure and simple, was regarded as possible. Mark 
the facts. 

Our Republican President himself, elected by a peo- 



UNMASK! 11 

pie fondly dreaming that Liberty miglit be allowed at 
least an occasional angel's visit to the White House, 
pleaded earnestly with the South to remain in the 
Union, on the ground that, if the Union sliould go. 
Slavery must go with it. 

The leading men of this administration joined in the 
warning and appeal, arguing with clearness and force 
that the Union was the only remaining fetter on four 
millions of human beings. 

"What," said the Secretary of State, "what but 
the obligations of the Constitution can prevent the 
anti-slavery sentiment of this country from assuming 
at once the European type, — direct emancipation?" 

Coincident were the appeals of clerical Unionists in 
the North to the Southern wings of their cliurches. 
The rivets of your slave's manacle are one with the 
rivets of the Union ! " Separated from the North," 
wrote Dr. Hodge in the Princeton Eeview, " a South- 
ern Confederacy of the Cotton-growing States would be 
at the mercy of the anti-slavery feeling of the world." 
Dr. Eliot, born and reared in Massachusetts, minister 
of the Unitarian Church in St. Louis, implores, in the 
name of Slavery, that Missouri shall resist Disunion : 
" Separate Missouri from the Union," he said, "sur- 
round her with hostile Free States, and in five years 
the number of those held to involuntary service would 
be exceedingly small." 

Did the American people know, as they watched with 
pride their colors floating from the mast where they 



12 THE REJECTED STONE. 

had nailed them, that those colors were the only ones 
on earth which could still protect the slave-ship ? Yet 
it is even so. England and France stand able and will- 
ing to prevent the slave-trade, but the slave-interest of 
our country has gained a stern prohibition of the right 
of searching our vessels ; and now any pirate has only 
to run up the stars and stripes over the smooth deck to 
protect the horrors of the Middle Passage underneath. 
On the 26th of February last. Lord John Russell said 
in the British Parliament : " This flag (the American) 
has covered a vast importation of slaves. If the Span- 
ish flag had been shown, our cruisers would at once 
have seized the vessels ; but as they bore American 
colors, it was impossible to do so." 

Of every other flag that floats under heaven, you may 
be sure that it does not cover the traffic in human 
beings : of thine, Union, we cannot even yet say 
whether it is protecting a nation's honor or a world's 
shame ! 

Think of it, my masters ! 

Think of America fitted out in the order of God as 
the Life-ship of Nations ; of America with a broad con- 
tinent for her deck, mountain-ribbed to match any 
billows, launched forth to respond to the signals that 
come up from voyagers that can struggle no longer ; of 
America, her true captain chained below, turned aside 
by mutineers from the perishing to whom she was sent, 
flaring in the eyes of the world the black flag of the 
slaver ! 



UNMASK! 13 

Reader, you know how it is at sea when the first big 
ground-swells come : the passengers mutually disclose 
what they have been dining on. The Union is always 
called the Ship of State ; and the figure was never so 
appropriate as now, when she has got out here amid the 
swelling waves of the popular heart, the fresh gales of 
Freedom filling her sails and snapping her flag, and all 
the churches and the parties seized with deadly sea- 
sickness. There is no doubt now what they 've all been 
fattening on. The vomit is black. We find that the 
churches have been retaliating upon the native Afri- 
can's fondness for " cold missionary," with an equal 
devotion to pickled Ethiopian ; and that the loaves and 
fishes at Washington have invariably been eaten with 
African sauce. 

Thus, then, we have overtaken the Mask. 

Of a truth we have discovered it a thing not of flesh 
and blood. 

It is over that Union, with its mask fallen, that a 
raven hovers to-day, with its one word, — Neyermore. 



14 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

III. 

PILATE. 

Yainly has this nation re-enacted the part of Pilate 
in his court. The king sat with the robe of power 
about him, and gave up Jesus to the mob. Then he 
calls for a basin of water, and, washing his hands 
therein, declares : " I am innocent of the blood of this 
just person ; see ye to it ! " 

Does that absolve the man whose business on that 
throne is to protect the innocent ? The verdict of the 
world is sure in the end ; for fifty generations Chris- 
tendom has gone on repeating, He suffered under Pon- 
tius Pilate, 

So this nation, sitting on the throne and surrendering 
Humanity to the tyrant and the pirate, has again and 
again washed its hands and proclaimed its innocence. 
Relentless posterity will all the same affirm that Hu- 
manity suffered under the Pilates — Democratic and 
Republican — who have ruled in the nation and in 
the States of the nation, and will not spend a thought 
on the political basins in which their hands are washed. 

The damned spot is in every palm ; there is not water 
enough in all the rivers and lakes of America to wash 
it out. The time will come when we shall be eager to 
pour in the basin our heart's blood, and seek in that to 
cleanse our hands of the stain fallen on us from the 



BETWEEN US BE TEUTH! 15 

sacred hands we have nailed and the side we have 
pierced. 

Henceforth, brother, if we must be devils, at least we 
can be honest devils ; and if any craven priest or tricky 
politician tells us that we have nothing to do with the 
crimes of the Union against man, more than with the 
widow-burning of Hindoos, or the cannibalism of Fiji- 
ans, shall we not at least tell him — in a devout and 
Christian-like way — that he lies ? 



IV. 

BETWEEN US BE TKUTH! 

Without doubt, the rule of Slavery in the United 
States, which began its wane as the century passed its 
noon, was one legitimate and structural phase of the 
country. It was the result of certain compromises 
made by its builders ; and freemen had either to endure 
it as best they could, or, as some of the bravest did, 
take sides with the stone which the builders rejected 
against the whole fabric. But can any man in his 
senses imagine that men fresh from a revolution for 
Freedom would have stooped to that narrow gate and 
straitened way, unless they had seen, or thought they 
saw, the spacious halls of Liberty in the distance ? 



16 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

Would they then and there have forever sealed the 
doom of their new-born nation's independence ? Nail- 
ing lip a Republican in a barrel and rolling him into 
the river would then be only a symbol of what our 
fathers did for a whole nation of Republicans. Had 
the Union been the mere petrifaction of its most rudi- 
mental and unripe condition, a contract for the ever- 
lasting retention of its tottering infancy, a compact 
generating no power of self-conservation amid the emer- 
gencies of the future, then the nation would have 
kicked it off as a Chinese shoe, or limped with prema- 
ture decrepitude to pay, ere its minority had passed, 
the debt of Nature, — dissolution. Everywhere the limit 
of growth is the inauguration of death. But the 
conservative principle in the Constitution was the re- 
source of Power which it contained. The people ac- 
cepted the grub actual with the golden wings implied. 
And now when the period of change has come, now 
when the chrysalid throbs with the power which for- 
bids it longer to creep, Slavery steps forward, and cries, 
" In the Devil's name, creep forever, or be crushed 
forever ! " 

True, we agreed to the worm : it was not quite 
noble, but we did it, and grievously have we answered 
it ; — but this through all was our apology to the hu- 
manity we consented to wrong, — this the one solace to 
our own hearts in their pain and shame : " The worm 
is no common worm, but one with an inherent power 
and riglit to climb to wings. For the beautiful day of 



BETWEEN US BE TRUTH! 17 

its soaring and freedom, we will bear with its present 
meanness and devastation." 

There is need that between the star-spangled banner, 
and the stars with bars, a standard higher than either 
should be lifted, and on it the ancient motto of the 
Love that is too great to conciliate, — Between us be 
Truth. 

When the people of the South consented to the pres- 
ent Constitution, they gained some immediate benefits 
for Slavery, as we have seen ; but no less did they 
consent to the possible abrogation of every refuge and 
cover under which Slavery was permitted to hide. Ac- 
cepting that instrument, they consented not only to 
the election of Abraham Lincoln, but to that of Wen- 
dell Phillips, if two thirds of the American people 
should so much desire such a result as to change the 
Constitution so that Mr. Phillips could swear to sup- 
port it. South Carolina, in adopting that Constitution, 
pledged her allegiance to a power which could abolish 
Slavery throughout the land. For doing all these 
things, the Constitution contains definite formulas and 
methods in its power, by a sufficient majority, to sup- 
plant its own provisions. Who does not know, unless 
it be a Secessionist, that this power in any constitution 
of alteration and adaptation is the measure of its lease 
of life ? England has floated down like an ark over 
the social deluges of centuries, because her constitution 
was unwritten, and able to grow with the growing 



18 THE REJECTED STONE. 

world. " England," said Brougham, " has survived be- 
cause she knew when to bend." 

In its susceptibility of amendment, the Constitution 
recognizes the Higher Law, — the only law that never 
fails to be executed. 

An ancient code provided the penalty of death for 
any one who should propose any alteration of its pro- 
visions ; the proposer should die, even though his alter- 
ation should be adopted. And yet proposers came, and 
their dying breath winnowed that code in every partic- 
ular. Our Constitution contains no such bloody bar- 
rier to its improvement, though the Apollyon of Lynch- 
Law has sought to extemporize one even in the Senate- 
chamber. Whilst wisely securing thoroughness in every 
radical change, by demanding a majority large enough 
to place such change beyond suspicion of accident or 
caprice, our fathers left a door-way for the higher laws 
which higher civilization must from age to age enact. 
Had there been no such door-way, the walls would have 
been long ago battered in under the steady siege of 
Civilization. 

Observe, then, men and brethren ! that, in forming 
this government. Slavery clutched at the strength of 
the hour ; Freedom relied on the inviolable justice of 
the ages. They have both had, they must have, their 
reward. That it was and is thus is apparent from the 
very clauses under which Slavery claims eminent do- 
main in this country ; they are all written as for an 
institution passing away ; the sources of it are sealed 



THE ORGANIC LAW. 19 

up SO far as tliey could be ; and all the provisions for 
it — the crutches by which it should limp as decently 
as possible to its grave — were so worded that, when 
Slavery should be buried, no dead letter would stand 
in the Constitution as its epitaph. It is even so. No 
historian, a thousand years hence, could show from 
that instrument that a single slave was ever held un- 
der it. 



V. 

THE ORGANIC LAW. 

When the Secretary of State said. Liberty is alvmys 
in the Union, it was a truth in the guise of indirec- 
tion. But let us not be misled into supposing the 
Constitution to be the fortress of freedom, apart from 
those who occupy it; except for the equal right of 
occupation by the portal of the ballot which it gives 
to the friends of freedom, its every gun can be 
wheeled around against Liberty with much more ease 
than against Slavery. If the present agitation should 
do no more than bring about a free and frank dis- 
cussion of our organic law, and suggest the exigeant 
demand for its improvement, it will be worth more 
than it has yet cost us, or is likely to. There has 
existed heretofore a popular delusion that the abso- 



20 THE REJECTED STONE. 

lute and divine right of kings has in America been 
simply transferred to a paper king; that the Consti- 
tution is an inspired document, dealing with every 
interest of its own or our or any time with exhaust- 
ive generalization. " Who can tell," said Cicero, " but 
that the people may come to believe that these stones 
and pictures are the gods themselves." Just that 
came to pass. So the provisions of our Constitution, 
which our fathers themselves acknowledged as neces- 
sarily partial, and in many regards temporizing, are 
confused by the majority of our people with absolute 
laws, and worshipped accordingly. 

But, outside of mythologies, Minervas in full armor 
do not spring from the skulls even of Joves (and in 
the remote antiquity of our origin — some sixty or 
seventy years back — all American statesmen become 
Joves) . 

History and society repeat nothing more constantly 
than the maxim of natural science, Nihil per saltum. 

The Declaration of Independence has been called a 
series of "glittering generalities": low as was the 
spirit in which this phrase was uttered, it is certainly 
true in a most important sense. That Declaration 
was a study of the millennium, and that does not 
bloom on the sapling of one revolution, nor of a thou- 
sand. Human brotherhood is in it ; the instruments 
are scarcely invented — surely not tuned — to render 
that symphony. The men who announced those au- 
roral theories of human rights went home to buy 



THE OKGANIC LAW. 21 

and sell their human chattels as before. The French 
proverb says, " When the saint's day is over, farewell 
the saint." The signers of that Declaration did but 
make us a saint's day ; and it is to our credit that we 
rejoice in it more than in all the days whose transac- 
tions became the rafters of the house we live in. 

It was a " pattern shown in the mount," after which 
all things in the plain below were to be fashioned ; 
but no sooner have the tables of the law been given, 
and the lightnings of revolution amid which they were 
announced sheathed, than the prosaic exigencies of the 
hour asserted their qualifying clauses. God is great; 
Moses can approach him : a golden calf is more com- 
prehensible to the multitude. 

So the fiery Declaration cooled down to the wise 
and wary Constitution. 

It is a maxim of natural science that things move 
violently out of their places, calmly in them. Omi- 
nous warnings are found in Washington's Farewell 
Address ; and our earliest state papers show that fears 
of a divorce were expressed at the marriage altar; 
which indicate that the equilibrium of elements was 
even then felt to be imperfect. Under the increasing 
agitations, the popular mind has been so Union-besotted, 
that it has gone blindly deeper and deeper into the 
danger it meant to avoid by clinging to the Union. 
As an Ideal, we should have been guided by it to a 
solid shore: as an Idol, we have drifted with it on 
the breakers. 



22 THE REJECTED STONE. 

We may well ponder agitations which report things 
out of their places. For example, Democracy is the 
people governing themselves, — that is, making their 
own institutions. But the provision for the rendition 
of fugitives binds upon the citizens of Free States, 
to a certain extent, an institution they have abro- 
gated. It is like forcing a horse to live upon fish. 
Then, again. Democracy must have equal rights as 
an atmospheric condition. But by the constitutional 
basis of representation, the vote of a large slaveholder 
may balance that of two or three blocks of a Northern 
city. 

These elements, and one or two more that might be 
named, are out of their places in a Republic ; and much 
of the agitation of recent years may be attributed to the 
effort of the newly awakened forces of the New World 
to classify themselves more naturally. But let us not 
be misunderstood here. The political situation of the 
parties to the present ivar does not depend in the slight- 
est degree upon any defects in the Constitution. The 
North goes to the battle-field with a record of constitu- 
tional obedience clearer than some of her best friends 
could wish it. She has bowed her back to the heaviest 
burdens that could be constitutionally imposed upon 
her. She has been put to shame in her own gates, 
through long, weary years, and consented to toil on 
toward her day of deliverance by the slow, prescribed 
paths. Fulfilling the hard legal conditions. Freedom 
had climbed the hill Difficulty raised in her path by 



THE ORGANIC LAW. 23 

the Constitution itself, and was near to the gates of the 
beautiful palace Success, when Apollyon, macl with envy 
and hate, broke through his own limits, and prepared 
his darts at the very door of the chamber named Peace. 
The constitutional disparagements of Liberty have in- 
deed roused Liberty to higher exertions ; she has been 
more in earnest J;han if a freeman's vote had been equal 
to a slaveholder's ; the shame of repelling the fugitive 
from her door has nerved her to the atonement she is 
now ready to make by the shedding of blood ; but there 
has been no evasion, — no overleaping of conditions, — 
no cutting of knots she had agreed to untie. Boston 
saw the skeleton of George III. exhumed, bone refitted 
to bone, and the grinning skull crowned in her Court- 
House, — this so often as she surrendered her fellow- 
citizens to slavery. Cincinnati saw the Tour de Nesle 
rebuilt. Ohio, under a Republican Governor, held the 
clothes of those who stoned Margaret Garner and her 
children to death, and said, " Her blood be upon us 
and our children." 

No ! Slavery now appeals to arms, because Freedom, 
in her slow but steady progress, has left no informality 
— no flaw — which can be seized on to reverse the 
decision she has gained in any higher court. 



2-i THE REJECTED STONE. 

VI. 

THE REJECTED STONE. 

It is the inestimable gain of our present condition, 
that we have come to perceive a weak point in our 
organic law, — a stone left out, and that a fundamental 
one. 

A disease in any body always flies to the weakest 
point of that body, and thus proves what is its weakest 
point. 

Chase the fox, and it will show you the hole in your 
wall. 

On either theory of the Constitution, that which binds 
it back forever to the shell it is ready to cast, or that 
which empowers it to struggle up with the struggling 
world, — conserving its principle of life in its principle 
of growth, — our nation's present emergency brings the 
whole country to the stone which the builders rejected, 
announcing the irreversible decree that either we must 
be wrecked upon that stone, or else that it must be 
taken as the Head of the Corner. 

That stone is, essentially. Justice. 

The form in which it stands for us is the African 
Slave. 

The ethnologic African is nothing to us here, nor his 
place in the scale, nor yet his capacity ; our fact lies in 
this, that he is inevitably the Third Party in any con- 



THE REJECTED STONE. 25 

tract that can be made between the North and the 
South. He must be presently recognized as a party to 
the contract, who has ah^eady demonstrated his power to 
tear it in pieces. We have already had our experience, 
and if we do not profit by it, 'tis our own loss. Men 
who leap from precipices do not imperil the law of 
gravitation. Obey the truth, and it comes a life-giving 
sunbeam out of heaven ; disobey, and it comes all the 
same, but now a deadly sun-stroke. 

When our national firm was consolidated, the Afri- 
can's name was left off of the sign, as his right was left 
out of the compact ; but every year has shown his in- 
creasing power in that firm. It is plain he can be no 
longer considered even a silent partner. The thunder 
of his voice mutters under every home in the South to- 
day. They who hear it turn pale, and say : " Your 
nation is nothing and worse than nothing to us, unless 
it resolve itself into a Police Force for the protection of 
Slavery ; so soon as the Monster is denied its daily 
virgin, it turns to crush us." 

Fearful is their sincerity ! What they say is credible, 
as the last words of the dying ! Unless the organic law 
is so amended as to nationalize the code of Slavery, to 
adopt and foster the institution, the South feels herself 
to be, and is, in the midst of advancing society, like the 
prisoner of the Inquisition amidst the ever-encroaching 
walls of his dungeon, who could compute the minute 
when they must crush him between them. 

And to the North the warning of the African is 



26 THE REJECTED STONE. 

equally imperative. The North has walked behind to 
strengthen those who shot their arrows at him, but has 
found that every arrow was from a Tartar bow ; it has 
returned from its flight to plunge into those who 
thought to find security in the rear. The North has, 
in these last years, become a funeral procession follow- 
ing the hearses on which lie a fallen Literature, a 
tainted Ermine, a putrid Church. On the scholars and 
the orators Slavery has brought the plague of the Black 
Tongue. 

The Devil's Year draws to a close ; bring out the 
ledgers ! See, for every man bought and sold in the 
South, one was bought and sold in the North ! 

It is simply useless to accuse the builders on account 
of their rejection of this stone ; it was too large for 
them to lift. Have we not been dismayed by it, have 
we not from year to year shrank from it also ? The 
exigencies of a new and infant nation, requiring before 
anytliing else the necessities of national life and defence, 
forbade the adjustment of any such question. The true 
reason why this work was adjourned to us is its com- 
manding extent and grandeur. For those who see in 
this problem a question of the Negro race, its power or 
weakness, can do little more than bear a hod for the 
edifice that is to rise upon this Head of the Corner. 

Ages of Wrong have, like cold, hard glaciers, graven 
on this lowly stone the sacred signs of the Laws that 
cannot be broken ; now he stands in our midst the 
touchstone of every virtue. 



THE EEJECTED STONE. 27 

There is a print as of nails in his hands, and a hollow 
wound in his side ; and though as a sheep before his 
shearers he is dumb, a voice comes from behind him, 
saying, " What for this least one of my brothers you do 
or do not, you do or do not for me»" 

The Slavery Question is to take many years yet, for 
it involves the most transcendent laws that enfold the 
earth, — eternal laws of justice and humanity which 
have not yet risen, but have only lit up the morning- 
stars which sing of a new creation. That sneer so 
lately heard on the street about '' the eternal nigger," 
is not without its significance ; to America he has been 
and must continue to be eternal^ — even if his race 
should perish from the planet. Our relations to the 
Negro make him for us the sign of eternal justice and 
inviolable honor. The gift derives its sacredness from 
the altar. The more lowly and incompetent that race, 
the more sacred its cause to all loyal men. His plea 
the Negro can only utter by the tongue or pen of other 
races ; but his silence is more eloquent than any tongue 
or pen. He is absent from our pews, he is unfit for our 
parlors ; but his absence bears a more withering rebuke 
to the wrong that has held him down in the ascending 
world, than his presence. He can only sign his plea 
with his cross-mark ; but it is the indictment of human- 
ity itself against us, and that sign of the cross affixed 
is the double seal of his ignorance and of the inhuman- 
ity which has caused it. Thus the black man with- 
draws before the universality of his issue, which becomes 



28 THE REJECTED STONE. 

that between Absolute Right and Wrong ; the verdict 
he claims is the verdict of Man as against the oppression 

of a Class. 

Even if we cannot all see that his issue is that of the 
whole world, we have surely found that it is that of 
every race comprised in America. In our grief, we re- 
member the warning of Lamartine, that " man never 
puts a chain about his brother's neck, but God is sure 
to put the other end of it around his own." In our 
first revolution we saw that the right to take one pound 
implied the right to take a thousand ; we have required 
another to reveal that the right to enslave four millions 
implies the right to enslave thirty. Again and again 
we have shoved aside the importunate, widowed Africa, 
who came with shackled hand uplifted in petition ; and 
now that she troublcth us, we may avenge her. Her 
cause has become our own. 

Therefore we would avenge her ; but would we do 

her justice ? 

At this moment we are inviting the thunderbolt of 
subjugation by separating our own issue in the war 
from that of the African as far as possible. This day, 
were our part of this difficulty settled, by the rebels 
grounding their arms, there would be no difficulty, as 
far as our rulers are concerned, in consolidating the 
Union over the prostrate form of the negro. 

But the rebels have no thought of grounding their 
arms ; nor will they, until they see flashing in the sun- 
light a certain sword which yet sleeps in its scabbard. 



CONSERVATION. 29 

And it may be long yet before that sword is unsheathed. 
For to do justice to the Negro, is to lay the corner-stone 
of the Republic of Man. It is nothing less. Therefore 
this crisis is the most solemn hour that Eternity has 
dialled on Time ; and ages past and coming meet here, 
and stand unveiled and expectant. 



VII. 

CONSERVATION. 

The preservation of the Union, which is the task 
now assigned the American people, and of which, for- 
tunately, the evasion is harder than the accomplish- 
ment, must necessarily at first take the form of disin- 
tegration. With destruction all life begins. The birth 
of the germ is the death of the seed. The Union is 
under compulsion to find its life by losing it. When 
the sides of a seed-shell have fallen apart, sundered by 
the springing germ, vainly shall you endeavor to rivet 
them together again and remake the old seed ; they can 
be reunited only by becoming loam for the new form to 
which they have given birth. Every form, in any king- 
dom of Nature, contains the necessity of its decay as a 
form, in the germ of its perpetuity as an essence. 

This is a key to the startling evolutions which have 



30 THE REJECTED STONE. 

SO befogged the empirics, and before which the donkeys 
have not yet found presence of mind enough to bray. 
How is it that under the banner which is inscribed 
" Save the Union " are suddenly found the leaders 
whose lives have been consecrated to the destruction 
of the Union in the interest of Freedom ? Mr. Everett 
does not yet comprehend his strange proximity to Mr. 
Phillips ; and the New York Herald is dumfounded at 
finding itself under the same flag with the Anti-Slavery 
Standard. It is because until now the phrase " saving 
the Union" was the scarecrow of cowardice; now 'tis 
the watchword of heroism. It meant last year the fatal 
policy of fostering the ulcer that was eating out the life 
of the real Union ; to-day it means to lay the foundation 
of a nation that shall be permanent, because founded on 
the rock of justice. 

The Soul of Nature has given one wave of its wand 
over this land ; and, in the presence of this Prospero, 
the semi-brute Caliban and the winged Ariel start forth 
upon one service. All around us are the treacherous 
Calibans growling over the work they are forced to do, 
stung and maddened by the Ariels who sweep on with 
joy to the loyal task whose fulfilment marks the day of 
their own liberation also. 

Do we realize the straits and sorrows to which a large 
class of our fellow-citizens are reduced ? I refer to the 
large and much respected class of Sitters on the Fence. 

These have come to grief. " Sitting on the fence," 
once the symbol of earthly ease and repose, has now 
become the most- distressing of attitudes. 



COMPROmSE. 31 

Constant abrasions on each side have made the Fence 
so sharp, that one who sits on it is in imminent danger 
of being cut in two. 

In the South, if any one attempts to sit on it, he is 
compelled to ride for eternity upon its top-rail : in the 
North, owing to the recent employment of a distinguished 
maker of rails to repair the Fence, and the consequent 
shaking, any repose thereon is impossible to any poli- 
tician less skilful than M. Blondin. 

Virginia tried to sit there, and fell, breaking a good 
many bones ; Kentucky tried it, and was barely rescued. 



VIIT. 

COMPROMISE. 



The agitation of the South in awaking from the stu- 
por into which the Black Drug threw her, when new 
markets raised the price of slaves, learning now, for 
the first time since she signed the Compact, the nature 
and extent of that power wherewith it has all along 
been in gestation, is most natural. 

The instinct of Slavery is wiser than the consciousness 
of the Republican party, which is so eager to deny any 
dissatisfaction with Slavery where it exists, — opposing 
it only where it does n't exist. 



32 THE REJECTED STONE. 

The naturalists tell us that every animal knows by 
instinct, and at first sight, the animal that naturally 
preys upon it. The mouse just born, which has never 
seen any animal, will show every sign of terror at sight 
of a cat, whilst calm enough before other animals. 
The instinct of the Southern Mouse tells true when it 
recognizes that Freedom never yet rested — never can 
rest — quiet with its eye upon a slave. 

It is very plain that if, in ten years, had the normal 
progress of the country continued, two thirds of the 
people had been found determined on taking advantage 
of their constitutional authority to abolish Slavery, such 
a result would not have been outside of the ratio in 
which the anti-slavery sentiment has increased since 
Hale and Julian, twelve years ago, received less than 
two hundred thousand votes on the platform that now 
rules in the Capitol. 

Slavery, with the keen sense of the savage, lays its ear 
to the ground, and hears in those ballots falling for 
Abraham Lincoln the fatal tramp of many centuries, 
tlie mustering for liberty of the ages that take no step 
backward ; it does not pause even to listen to the pro- 
testations of Freedom's picket-guard, that her grand 
army will never invade the sacred soil of Constitutional 
Oppression ; cares not to inquire whether they are hon- 
est, or otherwise ; knows better ; prepares to defend every 
inch of its bloody deck, every fetter in its coffle. Thank 
God for that savage instinct which, when as yet there 
was no North, saved us from the deadly evils that 



COMPROMISE. 33 

spring from the making of promises that Fate must 
forever forbid us to keep ! 

The Republican party was doubtless sincere in its 
eager denial of any intent to interfere with Slavery in 
the States, even through legal and constitutional formu- 
las ; for even our President consented, in his inaugural, 
to offer this filthy coin, slipped by Seward into his hand, 
to purchase a Union, when the very fact of its having 
to be purchased, even with a half-dime, would prove it 
already gone. 

The Power which controls the country and the world 
— the Power which has put forth ten thousand parties 
like summer-leaves, and shed them when their autumn 
came, itself remaining rooted and fixed in the stratum 
that changes not — has already exculpated the Repub- 
lican party from any suspicion of ulterior intent, by 
raising up a nobler one to take its place. At a little 
town in Ohio, where they had two poles with party-flags 
flying from them, the people, when they heard the boom 
of a shot falling in Fort Sumter, went to the Common, 
cut down the two poles, tore away the flags, spliced the 
poles into one, which they raised with one flag on it. 
This is a symbol of a process which, somewhat slower, 
but rapidly enough, has been for some months going on 
with the parties ; the electric power of patriotism is 
bringing from each some contribution to the forces of 
Liberty. The Republican party needed this solvent, as 
well as others. It was no sooner in power than it 
3* 



34 THE REJECTED STONE. 

began to go the way of all parties. Hear a parable 

thereof. 

There was a young man, as the story runs, whose 
mistress was extremely ill ; anxious and distressed, he 
went forth to seek a physician able to cure her. On the 
way he was offered, and purchased at a large price, a 
talisman which had the magic quality of revealing to its 
possessor all disembodied spirits. With this he ap- 
proached the doors of the most distinguished physicians 
of Paris. All above and about their doors he saw, by 
the aid of his talisman, the ghosts of those who had 
departed this life under their practice. Spirits with 
pill-boxes, spirits with syringes, and lancets, and wet 
sheets, all spurted, and cut at, and sought to douse the 
unconscious doctors, whenever they appeared at their 
doors. Presently the young man, after wandering in 
despair from door to door of the celebrities, paused 
before that of a physician over which he saw two — 
only two — very mild-seeming spirits. The contrast 
with the doors of other doctors pleased him. '^ Here," 
he said, " must be an able physician ; only two have 
died under his charge, and they may have been too far 
gone before he was called in." The young man entered, 
and told his fear and distress : " 0, sir," he cried, " my 
only hope is in you ! " " And why," asked the happy 
doctor, " do you trust in me ? " " Ah," replied the 
youth, unwilling to mention his talisman, " have I not 
heard your reputation for success in difficult cases 
bruited throughout the city ? " " Good heavens ! " 



COMPROMISE. 35 

exclaimed the astounded doctor, " my reputation ! 
Why, I have not been in Paris but eight days, and 
never had but two patients in my life ! " The young 
man remembered the two he had seen over the door, 
and rushed from the room in despair. 

No wonder the country hurried away from such spirit- 
haunted doors as those of Dr. Democrat, Dr. Whig, and 
Dr. Knownothing. But over Dr. Republican's door 
there was a ghost before he had been in Washington a 
week, and he never had but one patient in his life. He 
inaugurated his practice in that city by proposing to 
the States to adopt, as a part of the Constitution, the 
most essentially unrepublican feature that could be in- 
serted in any organic code, namely, a fetter binding the 
people forever from any alteration of their Constitution 
as it concerns Slavery in the States. Jeff. Davis will 
never give this nation so deadly a stab as would the 
adoption of that provision by the people. In twenty- 
five years the very swords which now defend the Union 
would be turned toward its heart. 

If Compromise — that old serpent ever coiling about 
the tree of life — has been baffled this time, it is not 
because the party in power did not yield to his seduc- 
tions. Enough secret correspondence went on at Wash- 
ington, which it will for a long time be " incompatible 
with public (i. e. Cabinet) interest " to publish. (Alas ! 
we need it not ; the " Campbell and Seward Letters " 
are already too much 1) It now appears that the ser- 
pent only desired time to wound our heel ; four months 



36 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

he got, against the protest of the nation, and planted 
his fang JTist where he aimed. 

A compromise with the South has now been shown 
as impossible as a compact with a maniac. It is all the 
more so when the maniac has a method in his madness, 
and a sufficient reason for it. 

Are men fit to lead and rule the forces now roused 
into action in this country, who talk of " this wanton 
and unnecessary rebellion " ? Stupid ! 

There never was a more religiously earnest, deliber- 
ate, consistent, and necessary rebellion. Is it not as 
much the nature and mission of the thorns to spring up 
and choke the good seed sown in their midst, as it is 
the nature and mission of the honest soil to bring forth 
thirty, sixty, or an hundred fold ? Slavery has never 
departed from its normal development ; its exaspera- 
tion is the legitimated result of the exasperation of 
Freedom. It is always the sun itself that calls up the 
cloud that would obscure it. 

" The South has been told lies about us, and our 
designs." Not at all. The South understands us bet- 
ter than we do ourselves. They see that politicians 
have not awakened the forces that have made them, 
and cannot put them to sleep as they will. They have 
seen a man with a price set on his head setting up his 
Liberator in an attic with a Negro boy to help him, — 
now dipping his pen to announce the decapitation of 
Slavery under the guillotine erected by himself. They 
have seen millions kneel and weep at the uplifted scaf- 



COMPROMISE. 37 

fold of a man who struck at the heart of Slavery, and 
knew better than the cautious Secretary who said that 
the hero was "justly hung," that, the restraints re- 
moved, they would have seen then what they saw a 
week ago, — twenty thousand freemen gathered on the 
spot where John Brown died, and singing, 

" May Heaven's smile look kindly down 
Upon the grave of old John Brown ! " 

Already they heard the cartmen and boatmen of New 
York and Boston singing to the ring of steel, 

" John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back, 
Hallelujah ! 
His soul 's marching on ! " 

They counted each new face which came to the Senate 
or the House to stand for a principle which a few years 
since it was a disgrace, or worse, to whisper ; until 
from the Illinois grave of Lovejoy the conviction for 
which he died was called by two millions of men, and 
lifted as the standard of the nation. 

They have watched, step by step, the steady, un- 
impulsive progress by which the people of America, 
against all the interests so often controlling, — the 
mercantile interest, the Church interest, the political 
interest, the prayer of Peace, — marched forward from 
year to year to the music of Liberty. They looked 
straight into the eye of Destiny, and saw that the 
time must surely come when the free tongue of the 
Ballot would be touched with a live coal from the altar 



38 THE REJECTED STONE. 

of the American heart, and, though over a devastated 
land, would at length thunder to the world the law of 
Freedom and Humanity. 

They knew that Humanity's eyes are in its forehead, 
not its occiput ; that revolutions go not backward. 

The South was right, entirely right, in seeing that 
the election of Lincoln was the signing of the death- 
warrant of Slavery in the Union. It is no use smooth- 
ing matters to the patient who feels the hectic spot 
burning on the cheek. No doubt this first Republi- 
can Administration would have been more tender with 
Slavery than others ; so do we humor and indulge to 
the top of their bent those whose graves are near. 

But in the day when the Nation decided for the 
principle that Slavery had a right to be treated only 
as local property, and then ivith no more favor than 
other property, it tovched the seat of life. 

Slave property does not rest on the same basis with 
other property, and under the same treatment must 
inevitably pass away. 

Its recovery when astray cannot be trusted to the 
laws and courts by which recovery of other property is 
easy. 

It is not natural property, but the creature of enact- 
ment ; consequently it cannot live on indifference. A 
mother cannot leave the child born Avithout arms to 
make what way it can along with those who have two. 
Slavery has grown strong by being the darling of the 
government; it can now live by nothing less. 



COMPROMISE. 39 

Our leaders cannot yet bring themselves to treat 
slave-owners with no more consideration than cow-own- 
ers or house-owners. Would a general offer his army 
to recover a flock of sheep which had taken to their 
heels, affrighted by his advancing army? Would a 
commander turn aside from an invasion to crush out 
with an iron hand the army-worm, if it were devastat- 
ing the wheat of a field by which he was passing ? 

Where confiscation must touch the slaves of armed 
rebels, — more perilous as they are to us than thrice 
their value in other forms of property, — Congress halts, 
hesitates, mixes, then, holding its nose, swallows. This 
overweening tenderness is the meat on which this our 
Cassar has fed that he hath grown so great. Mr. 
Breckenridge truly called it a bill for the abolition of 
Slavery. Now wherever our flag cuts its way, liberty 
to every slave must go with it. This is theory, how- 
ever ; actual emancipation comes later. " He found 
thereon nothing but leaves ; for the time of figs was not 
yet." 

In the present conflict. Slavery has been more candid 
than we could have claimed. It has not, with the 
Northern traitors, based its secession upon personal-lib- 
erty bills : in some regions it has acknowledged the 
Fugitive Slave Law to be unconstitutional ; but every- 
where it has not failed to perceive that any State bill 
must be considered constitutional unless the appointed 
court declares it otherwise, and has craved no such 
decision, even with a court suited to its purposes. It 



40 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

has not based its moYement on any abridgment of 
territorial rights. It has frankly acknowledged that 
its very existence is incompatible with the existence 
of free government and popular suffrage. The ballot- 
box is its coffin. It demands girdling this year: it 
may demand hewing down next. It certainly will. 

In what attitude does all this place the North ? 

A mother fled from Moscow in a sledge drawn by an 
Arab steed. At her breast, folded warm from the cold 
of the bitter night, she held her babe. Then came 
the wolf upon her track, with its terrible howl: fast 
and faster sped the sledge over the frozen snow, but the 
hungry wolf gained on her. Piece by piece she cast 
behind all the provision she had ; the wolf devoured 
each, but, with hunger only whetted, rushed onward 
after the mother and her child. And now, when it was 
close upon her, she unwrapped the babe that nestled 
so near her heart, and cast it to the wolf. 

Unnatural mother ! Would it not have been better 
than thus to have purchased for thyself a life of shame, 
to have turned thyself to grapple with the wolf, and 
committed thy babe to the Arab steed and to God ? 

'T is but a picture of America, with hungry Slavery 
howling after her. Swift and relentless, it has pursued 
her : to it she has cast territory after territory ; to it 
she has cast her treasures and much of her best blood ; 
she has seized from weaker nations around her that 
with which she thought to satiate the monster ; she has 
seized the panting fugitive, there with halo of divinity 



COMPROMISE. 41 

about him, and torn him from the horns of God's altar 
to cast to the wolf. Insatiable, it presses nearer, and 
prepares for the final leap. 

And now the question is. Shall America cast to the 
wolf her own sacred child, — Liberty ? 

No! 

my brothers, a thousand times No ! Let the moth- 
er, let America, turn to cope with Slavery, though she 
be torn asunder, but let the holy child Liberty over all 
be saved ! 

This, then, being the moral situation of the two par- 
ties, each knowing the very existence of the other to be 
its own destruction, the very field of compromise is the 
field of battle. 

Freedom and Slavery have been hugging each other 
so hard that it has grown to a death-hug. 

We need not fear negotiation too much ; in this stage 
of the conflict, any compromise will be only a flag of 
truce. Some timid officials, wishing to get out of the 
region of " villanous saltpetre," may send out such a 
flag, and gain an armistice for a few months, — or 
years, — but the end cannot come until Slavery or 
Liberty lies slain ! 

It is written : " Righteousness and Peace have kissed 
each other." Sixty centuries of experience have add- 
ed : " Unrighteousness and War are forever linked to- 
gether." 

Can any compromiser promise us, as the result of his 

4 



42 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

plan, anything else than the old "irrepressible con- 
flict " ? You must cut the heart out of every thinker 
and reformer in America ere you get anything else ; 
and resistance is the multiplication-table of Reform. 

Is this, then, as some affirm, the swelling of a flood 
that shall presently subside again ? 

A traveller came to a river, and being unable to ford 
it, he sat down on its banks, saying, " I will wait until 
the river has flowed by." He waited long ; he built 
him a house there ; and when the traveller's bones were 
traces of white lime, and the house marked only by the 
luxuriance of weeds on its site, the river was still flow- 
ing by. 

Let America scorn to adjourn to her children in the 
future the task now assigned her : she is too old in 
sorrow already not to know that a postponement is all 
she can effect, even if the Kind Hand has not removed 
that temptation. " The cup that my Father hath given 
me to drink, shall I not drink it ? " Not to be evaded 
— nor dashed aside — nor spilled, was it given. 

Hail, hail to thee, Messiah of Nations, thou who 
comest from Edom with thy garments dyed red ! With 
thee go the blessings, for thee rise the prayers, of noble 
hearts all over the world, as thou goest forth steadfastly 
to tread the wine-press prepared by Destiny for thy feet, 
knowing not the wine that shall come, only that it shall 
make glad the heart of man ! my country, there is a 



BKOKEN. 43 

path that leads from Gethsemane, garden of Agony, up 
to the snow-pure summit of Tabor, Mount of Trans- 
figuration. There shall thy nobler children rear for 
thee the tabernacles of the Past, the Present, and the 
Future ! 



IX. 

BROKEN 



In an old Law-book — older than the Constitution, 
or the Missouri Compromise, or the Omnibus Bill — it 
is written of the Rejected Stone : Whosoever shall fall 
on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it 
shall fall, it ivill grind him to powder. 

Against the strong arm of this Universe hold out as 
we may, at length to its behest we must be broken. 
The Phoenician replies to the lightning with arrows ; at 
last men return their arrows to the quiver, and lift the 
lightning-rod for protection. Canute lashes the ad- 
vancing tide ; at last men note the high-water mark, 
and build far enough beyond it. So we yield in the 
end. 

Broken ! 'T is no threat. 'T is no violence. The 
shuck of the wheat is broken under the flail, that the 
grain may be separated ; the grain itself is broken, that 



44 THE REJECTED STONE. 

bread may be kneaded. Even so it is with nations : 
under the flails of God they too must lie ; upon his mill, 
forever revolving, they must be broken. 

" The mills of God grind slow, 
But they grind exceeding small." 

In the pride of our progress, in the ruddy strength of 
our youth, we lost the one thread that links the present 
to the past, we neglected the ever-accumulating tradi- 
tion, that Justice alone can really exalt a nation, that 
Justice being overturned will overturn. A few years 
ago our leading statesman announced that there was a 
Higher Law than any human code. An angry echo from 
every point of our national compass growled back upon 
him ; the majority of the nation defied the supreme 
right, until he who brought the tables of that Higher 
Law was compelled to break them. Our fathers, kneel- 
ing with reverence before the sublime fact, still fresh in 
the wonder of nations, that a handful of men had been 
able to repel the strongest of nations, simply by the 
power of rectitude in their cause to engender super- 
human strength, had recognized the Law higher than 
that which they framed, and left open the door of 
Amendment whereby new revelations might enter. 
But our nation declared for nullification of the Laws 
of God. It declared for injustice. It announced that 
the black man had no right that the white man was 
bound to respect. It enacted that every American, 
when called on by an arch slave-hound, should at once 



BROKEN. 



45 



get down on all-fours, and become a slave-hound. It 
went on from whorl to whorl of corruption, it drew 
near to the bottomless pit, when suddenly the Great 
Hand rescued it from the nearly completed death, and 
cast it upon a glorious Eevolution to be broken. 

Did we think to gain anything by consenting to sell 
our brother to the Egyptian, heeding not his cries and 
tears ? Lo ! a mighty famine is in the land, and the 
lost Joseph is seen clothed with the power of locking 
all the produce and wealth of the country. 

Begin on the lowest plane, for some are oxen and 
must be led by hay, and ponder well the " broken " 
fortunes of this country, resulting from its proud con- 
ceit that it could outwit the equity of the Universe ! 
A pre-^sopian fable relates that there was a fox who 
espied a garden of luscious grapes. To this garden, 
however, he could find but one gpening, and that was 
too small to admit his somewhat portly dimensions. 
The grapes were very tempting, — what could Reynard 
do ? He hit upon a plan ; he would fast until he 
became lean enough to get through the hole to the 
garden. Each day he tried, and on the third day found 
himself sufficiently reduced to enter. Judge how the 
hungry, half-starved rogue enjoyed those delicious 
grapes ! But hark ! there is the sound of a farmer's 
voice ; — surely that was the distant bay of a dog ! 
Master Fox finds that his plan is not altogether safe ; 
the close fence was built to exclude foxes. He hastens 
to the hole ; but, alas ! he finds that the hole which was 

4* 



46 THE REJECTED STONE. 

large enough to admit a fox that had been fasting three 
days, is too small for a fox full to the mouth of grapes. 
What can he do ? Another ominous bay of the distant 
hound decides him ; he must needs fast three days 
more, and then, just as the gardener and his dog en- 
tered, he managed to escape just as lean a fox as he 
ivas when he reached the delicious grapes. 

Thus it was that the Northern fox entered the 
Southern cotton-field. On what a low diet he must 
put himself! "We have some prejudices against the 
buying and selling of men, which don't go easily into 
a plantation." Mr. Webster replies, "You must con- 
quer your prejudices." Good heavens ! who would 
have thought that men could starve out to such an 
extent the love of justice, the conscience, the man- 
hood which they had inherited! Yet the State would 
not make the hole J^igger, and the Church did not 
tempt them with any other viands to abstain ; and at 
length the North was morally reduced enough to get 
on its knees and creep into the small aperture to 
King Cotton's dominions. Speedily the Yankee fat- 
tened on the grapes ; great flakes of Wall Street stuck 
out on his sides ; State Street layers puffed out his 
eyes so that he could scarcely see ! 

But the day of danger looms up. When Master 
Fox gave up soul and heart to get amongst these 
Southern grapes, he did not mean to give up himself 
also ; but here Slavery is dogging him also. We need 
not pursue further the history of the humiliating ne- 



BROKEN. 47 

cessity which we are now undergoing ; the North is 
now disgorging all that it gained by years of shame- 
ful compliance to the evil of the South and the crime 
of the nation ; and it must continue to pay down dol- 
lar on dollar until it reaches some new Plymouth 
Rock, as lean as if it had never seen the garden of 
the South, but rich, let us trust, in the experience 
that will never again let the seeds of the Mayflower 
wither as they spring up, because they have no depth 
of earth. 

The Devil seemed to be the shrewdest of Yankees ; 
now the old proverb is remembered. The Devil '5 an 
ass. 

" Thou hast conquered, Gralilean ! " said dying Ju- 
lian, the Apostate. The North may, and will, now 
collect the bones of her great-browed children who 
yielded because she said Yield ; the fallen pillars of 
her crumbled Church ; her children whose wounds yet 
smoke fresh from the stab of Slavery ; — and, broken 
now upon the stone she so long refused, shall write 
as their epitaph, 

Vicisti, O Humanitas ! 



48 THE REJECTED STONE. 

X. 

THE PRIVATEER. 

A CRY comes up to the ear of America, — a long, 
piercing cry of amazement and indignation, — recog- 
nizable as one which can come only when the pro- 
foundest depths of the human pocket are stirred. The 
privateers are at large ! They have taken away my 
coffee, and I know not where they have laid it. They 
have taken my India goods with swords and staves. 
For my first-class ship they have cast lots! 

Was such depravity ever known before? So long 
as it was a human soul, launched by God on the 
eternal sea, that they despoiled ; so long as it was only 
a *few million bales of humanity captured ; so long 
as it was but the scuttling of the hearts of mothers 
and fathers" and husbands and wives, — we remained 
patient and resigned, did we not ? But coffee and 
sugar, — Good God ! what is that blockade about ? To 
seize a poor innocent sloop, — has Slavery no bowels ? 
And its helpless family of molasses-barrels, — can hearts 
be so void of pity ? Slavery must end. The spirit of 
the age demands it. The blood of a dozen captured 
freights crieth to Heaven in silveriest accents against 
it. 

Brothers, there is a laughter that opens into the 
fountain of tears. 



THE PRIVATEER. 49 

Can you tell me, you ship-owners and rich mer- 
chants, for how many cycles the coffee-berries ripened 
and fell ere came that marvel, a human hand, to gath- 
er them for you ? Will you ponder the stretch of the 
ages when fields of sugar-cane rotted to bring on to 
new growths, and these to others, to prepare merely 
the sod worthy to support the foot-sole of the man 
whom you have seen nailed up body and mind in your 
sugar-hogshead, without complaint, so long as the sugar 
came safely to hand ? Have you not confused things 
a little, imagining that in Nature the dusky man was 
for loam, and that the culminating glory and flower 
of the universe is Cotton ? How else shall we inter- 
pret your years of silence and calmness when only men 
and women were in the hands of the privateer, and 
your outcry when old metals and juices and vegetables 
are imperilled ? 

Yet, too thankful that even thus the heart of trade 
is moved, one who, through many weary years, has 
watched the torches kindled at the Light of Lights 
flickering their lives away in the dark caverns under- 
neath Trade's gay saloons, cannot repress delight at the 
gay privateer. God speed thee, rakish Sumter, and 
thee, swift-pouncer Jefif. Davis ! May Heaven's blithest 
breezes fill your sails, until your arrows of conviction 
have penetrated every unconvinced heart ! We have 
got our Scripture interpretations fearfully confused ; 
you peppery missionaries will shed brilliant exegetical 
light over the land. We shall have revised views from 



50 THE REJECTED STONE. 

President Lord on the curse of Canaan, and anti-piratic 
commentaries on the case of Onesimus, from Nehemiah. 
Our ethnology has become somewhat foggy; your ar- 
guments will be stronger than the now fashionable ones 
of Nott and Gliddon ; we may discover a link in the 
races lower than the Negro, without travelling with Du 
Chaillu. God speed thee, brave privateer ! 

So long as African Slavery runs the blockade of the 
parties and churches of America, so long may the 
privateer run the blockade of the Southern coast with 
safety ! 



XI. 

A FOREIGN POWER. 

The promptness with which the Secretary of State 
has expressed the position of our government on our 
Transatlantic relations, has elicited the warmest com- 
mendations of the people. It has been distinctly an- 
nounced that in this contest we will submit to no 
interference and accept no help from foreign powers. 

Especially, none from the Powers Above ! 

Toward the last foreign powers the cold shoulder 
has been turned in a way to rejoice the hearts of the 
New York Herald and the Boston Courier, and many 
others, who have long insisted on the strict application 



A FOREIGN POWER. 51 

of the Monroe doctrine to the government of God, 
whose aims at encroachment on this continent they 
have watched with such a jealous eye. 

Yet it is less than doubtful if we can conquer with- 
out them, or irrespective of an alliance with them. 

Except as the two are symbols of other facts, we 
suppose that Htimanity at large is entirely indifferent 
whether the individual residing in the White House for 
the next four years is named J. Davis or A. Lincoln. 
If these two represent inferior and superior principles, 
so that, as one or the other rules there, the shadow 
moves forward or backward, marking progression or 
retrogression on the dial of civilization, — then the 
world is pledged to the superior. But suppose that to 
England, for instance, there are presented simply two 
jarring political — purely political — interests, in the 
names of the two Presidents ; one representing the 
integrity of the boundary-line of a rival nation, the 
other the independence of a nation not her rival, and 
on which she is dependent for cotton. The govern- 
ment, obeying its first instinct, self-preservation, as our 
own does, stands perfectly justified in taking sides with 
that party in which her interest is most involved. Eng- 
land has herself set up the standard of emancipation, 
and to that her people would hold her ; but where 
that principle is not only not involved, but distinctly 
disclaimed, the people will leave the government to 
the normal influences of the cotton-mill. They do 
perfectly right. The anti-slavery men of Europe have 



52 THE REJECTED STONE. 

little reason to choose between governments supported 
by Caleb Gushing, B. F. Butler, and the New York 
Herald, on the one hand, and Yancey, Rhett, and Jefif. 
Davis, on the other. It is brought before Europe as 
a purely political question, and we cannot, without a 
contemptible conceit, expect any element to determine 
the attitude of Europe toward it higher than Policy. 
Is not popular government involved ? Assuredly ; but 
Europe has decided already that popular government 
is not good ; equally it has decided that cotton is 
good. 

Now let us trace this same principle as it decides our 
relation to the transmundane Power. 

Our Congress requested the President to appoint a 
day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer ; and he did so ; 
which shows that we have rather more disposition to 
conciliate this than any other foreign power. This is 
doubtless due to our late defeat. One is reminded of 
the psalm our fathers sang, — 

Jeshurun he waxed fat, 

And down his cheeks they hung, 
He kicked against the Lord his God, 

And high his heels he flung. 

Jeshurun was reduced. We also have been reduced, 
certainly in a military, and we trust in a moral sense. 
When any fruits of this repentance are brought forth, 
we shall be glad to record the indications. Thus far 
we stand fighting for as purely a selfish end as the 
rebels of the South. 



A FOEEIGN POWER. 63 

No doubt there are thousands of men North, and with 
our army in the South, who plead and fight for justice 
and freedom, not only to the electors of Mr. Lincoln, 
but also to men of every color. These maintain the 
government, because they hope that in its contest with 
the slaveholder the slave will be freed. But should the 
star-spangled banner ever float on the shores of the 
Gulf and still over African slaves, the hearts of thou- 
sands would once again freeze toward this nation, and 
the flag of Disunion float in the North with thousands 
around it where hundreds were before. 

Our President and his premier have given us our 
watchword ; they have told us that between Slavery 
and Freedom there is an " irrepressible conflict " ; if 
the Union with slavery in it is regained, all will know 
that it is but the lull of the volcano. 

Thomas Jefferson once said that, if the South were 
ever to witness an insurrection of slaves, there was no 
attribute of God which could take the side of the op- 
pressor in that contest. The two leading commanders 
of this war against an insurrection initiated their en- 
trance into the regions of slavery by a promise of crush- 
ing out with an iron hand the insurrection of slaves. 
In other words, should these Negroes take side with our 
men in a struggle of life and death, they would be shot 
down for helping us ! Another general proclaims that 
no fugitive shall enter his lines. Our President, in the 
midst of a slaveholders' insurrection, and on the blessed 



54 THE REJECTED STONE. 

4th of July itself, sends a message to Congress in which 
slavery is not remotely alluded to. 

Not long ago a distinguished friend of the Republic 
of Haiti, in company with a very able and learned Sena- 
tor, entered the office of a very wise and diplomatic 
Secretary of one of the departments of this govern- 
ment; whereupon a scene like this occurred. 

Senator. Mr. Secretary, permit me to introduce you 
to Mr. A. B., a friend of the Haitian government, and 
authorized to represent the same to a certain extent. 

Secretary. How do you do, Mr. A. B. ? 

A. B. Quite well, I thank you. 

Senator. The Haitian government now naturally 
hopes that the success of Republicanism secures the 
recognition of her Republic. 

A. B. She is ready to send her minister at any time. 

Secretary (twisting uneasily in his seaf). Really, 
gentlemen, this is a very grave and difficult question, 
and I have not leisure to consider it. 

Senator. A difficult question ? 'T is but a scratch 
of your pen. 

Secretary (twisting three times in his seat}. But, 
sir, — really, sir, — I — I — 

A. B. 0, do not let us press it, if the government is 
averse to it. 

Secretary. The fact is, gentlemen, Washington can- 
not receive a black minister. 

(Exeunt Sen. and A. B. ivith " Good mornings.'''') 

The Republican Administration had answered Repub- 



A FOREIGN POWER. 55 

lican Haiti in the very words of Henry A. Wise, when, 
a nation freed by her own right arm. she vainly ap- 
pealed to America for recognition, as America had a 
few years before, and nnder the same circumstances, 
appealed to other nations. 

The intrenchments about Washington may be very 
complete, but mark this : Washing-ton is not safe until 
a black minister can be received there ! 

Now, whilst we are speculating as to the possibility 
of our blockade being raised by France and England, 
would it not be well for us to see if we have not 
weakened our cause and our force by completely dis- 
owning the only moral element in this conflict ? 

We have made, or are in danger of making, four 
millions of disappointed enemies in the South, whom 
we might have counted on as our friends in any emer- 
gency. Freedom is first with the black, as with every 
man ; next to that, the evil he knows, against that he 
knows not. Every Negro returned to his master — to 
be made an example of what treacherous Negroes may 
expect in these times — has sown amongst his com- 
rades the seeds of hate and revenge against our army. 

We have disheartened many of our noblest and 
best young men, by degrading with a taint of man- 
hunting and oppression the banner and the cause. 

We have paralyzed the pulses of the lovers of equal- 
ity and liberty all over the world, which were ready 
to beat toward us with a steady tide of sympathy and 
encouragment. How could Victor Hugo or Garibaldi 



56 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

extend their hands to a general, who, with the very 
weapon with which he is defending his own liberty, 
is ready to crush others who would seek theirs? 

We have lost the battle of Manasses, and with it 
the prestige of a first victory and the order of an 
army, chiefly because General McDowell's colorpho- 
bia must cut off the Negro's hope, and with it his own 
only source of information. It was a crime and a 
blunder. 

In refusing to recognize Haiti we have shrouded 
the one light that might now be shining over the 
darkest problem of this war. 

Would it not be a curious case of poetic justice if, 
in a year from now, we should witness a " situation " 
somewhat like the following ? 

1. The United States calling on the slaves of the 
South, to whose bondage she has so long been a 
party, whose possible freedom by confiscation she re- 
luctantly approved, to save her entire people from 
subjugation. 

2. The United States begging Haiti to help her sus- 
tain and shield millions of manumitted women and 
children, and invoking a black minister at Wash- 
ington. 

The army of the United States is, without doubt, 
fighting for the liberty of the slave; but so also is 
the army of the Confederate States. Both are, by 
compulsion, hastening the day of freedom (but that 



A FOREIGN POWER. 57 

is scarcely more our object than it is theirs). Indeed, 
the Southern army has done more of this indirect ser- 
vice to humanity than our own. With both it has 
been involuntary. There is a Power behind both 
thrones at work. Freedom sits above, in calmness and 
light, and we know her star cannot recede below the 
horizon ; but whether she is to be advanced the next 
step by a dreadful retribution to the recreant North, 
or by the conquest of the South, is, alas ! yet doubt- 
ful. Again and again have strong governments, not 
built upon the head corner-stone of Justice, been 
buried under the splendor of their own ruins, that 
humanity at large might have another monument to 
say, Remember. 

Were our cause sanctified by any universal princi- 
ple, the arm of God, whose sinews are the true hearts 
of the whole world, would be folded about us. " But," 
it is replied, " we are fighting for the principle of 
free suffrage ; it is bullets arraigning ballots." Yet 
scarcely can free suffrage be called a principle. It is 
an institution yet on trial in the world ; it has yet to 
make its cause good at the tribunal of Eeason. Free- 
dom of the ballot is not necessarily good in itself; 
if it results in perpetuating injustice, or in anarchy, 
it proves itself a wrong principle. New York City has 
had to ask the State Legislature to select her munici- 
pal officers. England may well point to her superior 
freedom under limited suffrage. Her members of 
Parliament are not assassinated; her Queen does not 

5* 



58 THE REJECTED STONE. 

have to pass from Scotland to London in disguise; 
there is no county of her kingdom where her most 
radical orator is debarred an entrance on penalty of 
tar and feathers. All these evils have for years co- 
existed with our pojDular suffrage; and our Republi- 
can Administration would hardly have molested one 
of them^ had the South not precipitated this rebellion. 
Therefore we still maintain that, as far as our gov- 
ernment is concerned, that is, saving a reserved purpose 
among the unofficial masses whose power is yet to be 
measured, we have no aim in this conflict that makes 
our cause the cause of Destiny, or our success any ne- 
cessary step in the progression of the world. 



XII. 

MANASSES. 



It is said that one of our army chaplains had pre- 
pared a discourse on the text, " Manasseh is mine." 
It was never preached : at daybreak his regiment was 
marching forward, with the hope of preaching the same 
text from the cannon's mouth. But the text has re- 
mained a vision in the Psalms. 

Manasses is a symbol. The assault and the courage 
of it, the repulse and the shame of it, symbolize with 



MANASSES. 59 

unerring accuracy a certain moral status of our nation, 
consequently of its army, which, by the conditions of 
the Universe, did not deserve Manasses and did not 
obtain it. Why were we defeated there ? We had 
poor generals. Why had we poor generals ? Why 
was Patterson enabled by his cowardice or treachery to 
make our disaster sure, after McDowell by blunderingly 
marching in the dark had made it probable ? Both of 
these men were known as life-long cringers to the men 
they were sent to fight. If John Brown had been with 
a United States army at Harper's Ferry, would he have 
been animated with what seems to have been Patter- 
son's one aim, — to return his young volunteers safe to 
their parents unharmed ? Not so did John Brown re- 
turn his own sons. If Montgomery of Kansas had been 
at Fairfax, would he have scorned the only medium of 
intelligence and real help, — the fugitive negro ? 

Why were these men, who had proved themselves 
moral cowards, set to control the forces of Liberty ? 
The Administration took them because the country was 
not up to furnishing or standing by better men. The 
men who would unweariedly, sleeplessly, with the fire- 
heart of Peter the Hermit and the iron nerve of Crom- 
well, have pressed upon and taken Manasses on that 
Sunday, were men whose appointment would have re- 
turned on the Administration a storm of indignation. 
The country would have been divided, and perhaps 
surrendered. 

Had the country been up to a victory at Manasses, it 



60 THE REJECTED STONE. 

would have been previously up to having Charles Sum- 
ner for President. 

But let us search a little further. We have seen that 
we were outgeneralled because we had half-hearted men 
to lead our forces. Our soldiers fought bravely, ear- 
nestly, and had almost won the day. Why that panic ? 
The intrenchments of the enemy were perfect : our sol- 
diers conquered one battery only to find themselves at 
the mercy of two covering it. It had been impossible 
that Panic could have stormed our army if Despair had 
not first weakened it. Our army fought long after 
every soldier was convinced that they would never 
occupy Manasses that day. 

There were long months when, it is known, there 
were few if any batteries or forces at Manasses. Only 
give me time enough, and I will make any hen-coop 
impregnable to all the artillery now on this continent. 
The entire defences of that pass were reared by a most 
culpable fault on the part of our military and civic 
leaders, who will stand on the page of History which 
records that day as parties to a base deception of the 
American people. It is now evident that they began 
this contest on a theory radically different from that 
which the people had determined was the only one 
consistent with their national honor. The people were 
willing to trust them with the method, so long as it was 
understood that the object to be reached was assigned 
by them exclusively. Deliberately and absolutely the 
people had decided that there should be no new guar- 



MANASSES. 61 

anties to Slavery ; that there should be no compromise, 
however infinitesimal ; that this issue should fairly and 
squarely be an acceptance of the gauntlet thrown at 
their feet by the South. Yet there succeeded the up- 
rising of the people a delay which, under their very 
eyes, was improved by the enemy to make Virginia one 
large masked battery. 

There is no question of military tactics and strata- 
gem here, only a question of common sense and honesty. 
The men who repulsed drilled regulars at Concord 
Bridge did not wait for large arrays, fine uniforms, and 
months of drill. Nay, determination and rapidity had 
already done for us in Missouri what slowness and 
Hardee have undone for us at Washington, and would 
have so continued had not Washington stretched its 
red tape into Missouri. These men at the South were 
even more undisciplined than ours ; we should have 
been so far eq\ial ; they were our superiors in one thing 
alone, — they had stolen the means of putting a battery 
on every square acre of their frontier. To fight at once, 
we were stronger in numbers and as well drilled: to 
delay until they were fortified was to make us inferior, 
— the axiom being that one man behind the trenches 
equals four outside. The Secessionists of Maryland 
and Missouri have publicly declared, " We were con- 
quered only by being surprised." Virginia might have 
been to-day joining in the same confession. 

Meanwhile, about all this unfathomable strategy at 
Washington — which reminds one of Dr. Cudworth, 



62 THE REJECTED STONE. 

who, ill his contest with the Atheists, stated their argu- 
ment so strongly that he could n't answer it himself — 
there were indications that this delay was more for 
diplomatic than for military reasons. No traitor was 
treated as if we were at war. Mr. Breckenridge, in his 
seat in the Senate, taunted the government that it had 
not dared treat seized rehels as by nations they are 
treated. The people saw their own soldiers scourged 
and shot for offences in the camp, — offences half in- 
duced by the demoralization of the delay, — whilst 
spies and assassins were released on their already per- 
jured parole. 

It became probable to large numbers in this country, 
who hesitated naturally to express their suspicion, that 
TWO MEN at Washington, the one in the military, the 
other in the civic department, each a possible President 
and hitherto associated with that office, were running 
a race, each hoping to loom up before a reunited 
country as a great pacificator. 

Equally were these people convinced that their Presi- 
dent was entirely trustworthy, and that no such base 
pacification could be carried on without his being de- 
ceived with the rest of the people. 

Tlie suspicion increased when it came out that Mr. 
Seward had held correspondence with Judge Campbell, 
and that a quasi-armistice had been made at Pickens of 
which our President was " imperfectly informed." 

The suspicion spread like a contagion that we were 
deceived. The government gave no response ; no act 



MANASSES. 63 

was done, no traitor hung, to show that the government 
meant what the people meant, until at last, the misgiv- 
ing of our earnest masses becoming intolerable, they 
uttered their whole heart in that noble war-cry, For- 
ward TO Richmond ! 

The Tribune^ which was the tongue worthy to utter 
it, did indeed bow to the storm which always meets the 
Cassandras who utter too soon what all see presently ; but 
it will one day claim that watchword as the dearest 
laurel among the many it has nobly earned in this con- 
flict, and the people will one day remember those who 
told them the truth at risk of their own displeasure, 
and as long as they could hear it. 

It was not its fault, nor that of the people for whom 
it spoke, that stupid or selfish men, and deceivers of the 
nation, perverted those words into " Forward to Rich- 
mond half harnessed ! Forward whilst your regiments 
are in camps all over the North ! Forward on empty 
stomachs ! Be sure you take but one man to their 
three ! Be sure you depend for reinforcement on a 
man whom the mob of Philadelphia had to force into 
showing his colors ! " 

No loyal heart in America should have failed to 
recognize tlie plain and ominous tones concentred in 
that war-cry. It meant, — and many a tricky, trembling 
diplomat in Washington knew that it meant, — We, 
the people of America, are determined for once that we 
will not be deceived ! We do not deplore, but welcome, 
the hails that are now to sweep away the refuges of 



64 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

lies which politicians have been building out of the 
rights and honor of the nation. Gentlemen of Wash- 
ington, civic and military, we have arisen in our might ; 
each family has, with tears of agony, but no less eagerly, 
laid on the altar its first and fairest fruits ; we have, 
rather than offer a compromise of right and honor, 
surrendered wealth, nay, some of us the bread on our 
tables ; we have shown you that we are in earnest. 
We have yet to see one fact at our Capitol indicating 
that you are in earnest as ive are. These men you 
release on parole, we regard as the murderers of our 
country. These men you write billets to, we regard as 
the would-be assassins of our husbands, brothers, fa- 
thers, and sons. We will not be cheated. We distrust 
your moral position toivard this rebellion. No defeat 
that can befall us on our way to Richmond can be so 
bad as being defeated by some patchwork of compro- 
mise in our purpose of settling this issue with the South 
once and forever. We demand, then, that by some 
decisive blow, even if it recoil upon us, we shall be 
utterly committed to this war. We demand that the 
chasm shall be made so complete, that the most abject 
trifler who desires to bridge it with a compromise shall 
see that his effort would only sink him in the abyss. 
Therefore, forward to Richmond ! 

All this was in that war-cry, which is to be uttered 
yet again, and, though with the united voice of the 
country, with no more nobility than it possessed at 
first. 



MANASSES. 65 

When General Scott heard of the defeat at Manasses, 
he, with great excitement, said that the President should 
depose him as a coward, because he yielded to this 
popular pressure. General Scott is not physically a 
coward. Is he a moral coward ? Shall we take him 
at his word ? History records, that a great commander 
wrote after a defeat, " I have lost a great battle, and 
entirely by my own fault." In saying this he gained a 
greater victory than he lost. Had as sincere and great 
a spirit commanded at "Washington, we believe the 
country would have received some such message as 
this : — 

"To THE People of the United States: — 

" We, some of your official leaders, have lost you a 
great battle, by our own fault, as far as that fault can 
be traced to any individuals, which arises from the 
general corruption of the government through the ma- 
laria of Slavery. When you and your President de- 
cided to fight for this government, we, your public 
servants, tacitly meant to pacificate and compromise. 
Acting under this purpose, we gave to you as a reason 
for delay a military pretext. We had no doubt that 
the South would compromise. They secretly encour- 
aged us to think so, until, when it was too late to 
remedy our mistake, they showed that their desire 
for peace was a feint to get time for fortification. 
When we came to see for the first time definitely 
that the question must be settled by arms, the nation 



66 THE REJECTED STONE. 

was already demanding that our delay should end. 
It was natural they should so demand. But our first 
deception could, unless openly confessed, lead only to 
the defeat of our forces. We could not muster courage 
to acknowledge the result of our folly ; — to say, ' The 
advance which was feasible two months ago has, by 
our delay for negotiation, been rendered impossible. 
Our honest reply to your Forward to Richmond ! is, 
that it cannot be done for six months or more without 
too much cost, and to advance now would be to wash 
out a political deception in the blood of brave men.' 
We had not the moral courage to say it: the fatal 
result came." 

The People reply : — 

" Whether the people decide that you gentlemen 
who hold power under this administration are the right 
men in the right place, or the opposite, they cannot 
allow the blame to fall on you for a default which is 
much more their own. They remember that a wise man 
affirmed, ' The people are always correctly represented.' 
Their leaders, military and civic, had every reason to 
suppose that a people, who have for so many years 
submitted to having their honor bought and sold by 
their representatives, had still their price. Though 
now, ' a nation born in a day,' they abhor their former 
stupidity and insensibility toward Human Rights, no 
less than their own self-respect, yet they cannot reason- 
ably complain that these newly unsealed fountains have 



MANASSES. 67 

not as yet cleansed the Augean stables of Washington. 
Therefore we set up our memorial pillar at Manasses, 
on it writing, ' Here outraged Humanity was avenged 
upon a nation that, from the day of its own liberation, 
heard the scourges that fell, heard the cries of the 
stricken, and heeded not, but went on in ignoble rest, 
until the very sword which guarded their own liberties 
had rusted in its scabbard.' Therefore we take to 
ourselves the reproach you have heaped on yourselves, 
to bear it with you ; and if we call new leaders to 
your places, it is not for punishment, but it is another 
effort to make ourselves understood at Washington ; 
it must be there known that we, the people, are in 
earnest ; that we are absolutely determined that this 
rebellion shall be crushed, and that in no case shall one 
half of this continent be given over to the dominion 
of Slavery and Barbarism ; and that whosoever shall 
put himself in the way of this purpose shall be swept 
off as by a flood." 

Here let us end this sad chapter, — as painful to him 
who wrote it as to any who shall read it. 



68 THE REJECTED STONE. 

XIII. 

BETH-EL. 

This was the name that the patriarch gave to the 
place where he came a wanderer : there the sun went 
down, and he slept with a stone for his pillow. In that 
night, over that stony pillow, hovered the angels ; and 
in the morning " he took the stone that he had for a 
pillow and set it up for a pillar." From his hard lot 
uprose his strength. 

Hard was the pillow given at Manasses, upon which 
America must rest her head. Is there no heavenward 
ladder stretching up from that grief? Can she not also 
take her stony pillow and set it up for a pillar of future 
strength ? " Experience," says Carlyle, " does charge 
dreadfully high school-wages, but she teaches as none 
other." To the same end Burns's cheery verse : — 

" Though losses and crosses 
Be trials right severe, 
There 's wit then, you '11 find there, 
You '11 get no other where." 

The first and most important lesson inculcated at 
Manasses is, that God is not on the side of the best bat- 
talions. 

I know that Napoleon said he was ; but I also know 
that soon after he began to act on that principle his 



BETH-EL. 69 

Battalion-Providence took him to perish on a small 
rock off the coast of Africa. 

There was a time when Napoleon's battalions were 
arrayed on the side of God ; his eye was filled with the 
coronation-day of Humanity, not of himself; then indeed 
he was the Man of Destiny, for Freedom marches to the 
drum-beat of Destiny. Then it was that Beethoven, 
lover of the people, wrote the " Symphony for a Hero." 
But soon one brought the old composer tidings of 
his idol which caused him to leap from his seat, and 
tear the Symphony, and cast it to the fire ; then, with 
tears, he sat down and wrote the " Funeral March for a 
Hero," who, as a person, was still living. Alas ! he lived 
no more for Man : the Eternal Thought he demanded 
should shape itself to his battalions. So the halo of 
Napoleon faded to a diadem. 

There is nothing arbitrary or specially providential 
in all this. He lost his faith in the power of ideas, in 
the tremendous power of enthusiasm for a higli cause ; 
forgot that the sword that seemed to translate the light- 
ning when striking for eternal Truth and Right, was 
but a piece of steel, or less, when carving a throne for 
a man, even though that man were Napoleon. Again 
and again the lesson has been assigned us to learn. 
Xerxes, advancing upon Greece with his countless host, 
does not find that God is on the side of the strongest. 
The same testimony was borne at the baptismal blood- 
font of this nation, and the world called to observe how 
three millions had successfully repelled for eight years 



70 THE REJECTED STONE. 

the strongest nation on earth, and at last brought it to 
terms, simply because their cause bore with it the in- 
spiration of Liberty. 

It seems that we needed Manasses to remind us of 
it once more. 

" What ! was the cause of the rebels, and not that 
of our nation, the cause of Liberty ? " 

Let us not fear to face the facts, most of all this 
chief one : Tliey were fighting for their liberty. True, 
it was their liberty ; the liberty of Wrong, the free 
course of Anarchy, the untrammelled rule of Passion,' 
the uncurbed privilege of trampling the most sacred 
rights and hopes of mankind, — a liberty which the 
laws of this Universe forever more deny ! Still, mark ! 
this blow for animal liberty calls up the animal ferocity 
and strength, which can be mastered only by an equal 
passion and fortitude for the higher liberty. Fanati- 
cism is only second in strength to inspiration ; and we 
can conquer in this war only when the love of Human- 
ity inspires us as fully as the love of Slavery inspires 
the South. Enthusiasm for bunting ; interest in a 
boundary line ; concern for the control of the Missis- 
sippi ; " institutions bequeathed by our fathers " ; " the 
glorious fabric of our Union " ; — I warn you, my 
countrymen, that at whatever Manasses these alone 
meet the arms that fight for the kingdom of Oppression, 
they will be swept away as by a blasting sirocco. 

Let us follow the approved maxim that bids us learn 
from our enemy, and sit at the rebels' feet a moment. 



BETH-EL. 71 

See liow he fights for Slavery ! See how pitiless he is 
to the enemy of Slavery ! Do you live in a Slave 
State ; say one word against the institution, and see 
if the hearts that knew your childhood do not freeze 
to ice, and if the arms once twined about you will not 
be drawn to strike ! Over all the appeals of relation- 
ship and affection, over all the claims of brain to think 
or tongue to speak, over wasted humanity, Saharas of 
ignorance, over the interests of property, — over all, 
the Slave-God sits amidst his devotees. He has his 
martyrs, as much as Brahm or Jehovah. The parallel 
drawn between the warfare of Sepoy and Southerner is 
not fanciful ; all races fight so for their religions, and 
Slavery is the real and only religion of the South. To 
it other regions are evil in proportion to their freedom ; 
other Free States are diabolical, more or less ; Massa- 
chusetts is the Devil, because Antislavery is Antichrist. 
Our reporters have told to horror-stricken ears the 
cruel excesses which succeeded the battle of Manasses. 
A young man from the North, we are told, finding a 
rebel soldier in a swoon, proffered his canteen ; the 
Southerner drank, and revived, then immediately shot 
his benefactor. The story is intrinsically credible. 
Returning from his swoon, his first thought was for 
his cause, and the blow for that cause which he was 
on that field to strike ! Supposing him even to have 
comprehended all, — to have recognized his preserver 
in his country's enemy, to have felt the gratitude which 
any brute must feel, — yet what business has he to let 



72 THE REJECTED STONE. 

gratitude or any personal feeling come between him 
and his cause ? That benefactor may be the very man 
to send a ball through Jeff. Davis's heart ! He is not 
his own, else he could press that kindly hand ; he is 
Slavery's, aiid Slavery has whispered all other spirits 
out of him, and filled him with its own. Ah, if Free- 
dom but had champions so surcharged with her spirit ! 

Slavery is a god, and has in the South gradually 
created his own new heavens and new earth. In the 
latter generations, he has moulded the very brains in 
their wombs to his own image and likeness, so that they 
reek with hot blood when any foe speaks in unbelief of 
their creator. He is dear to them as to the eye is the 
light of which it is the organism. 

Now, Northmen, with w^hat do you confront this ? 
Have you any Freedom-frenzy, with its superhuman 
strength ? Do you worship Liberty with a passion such 
as the heart has for its blood ? Is Liberty an uncom- 
promisable principle to you, so that you count its foes 
the agents of the fiend upon earth ? Has Boston 
treated Mr. Yancey, when there pleading for Slavery, 
as Charleston treated Mr. Hoar, when there to dis- 
tantly hint Liberty ? or does Ohio treat Breckenridge 
as Virginia treats Nelson of Tennessee ? 

The other day, Mr. Speaker Grow, retiring tempo- 
rarily from the chair of the House, called to that seat 
Mr. Burnett of Kentucky, an avowed sympathizer with 
treason. Some one called attention to the contrast 
between the Republican and the Southern Speaker, 



BETH-EL. 73 

Orr, wlio never called any one to the chair but one of 
his own party, and evidently considered the contrast 
in Mr. Grow's favor ! Trace the course of the two 
Speakers, and they will take you logically to the rela- 
tive positions of tlie two armies on the evening of 
July 21st. And until the country has got so far be- 
yond these sentimentalities as not only to condemn 
utterly even so slight a dapperness as that of Mr. 
Grow, but to render it as impossible for Burnett to 
sit in Congress as it would be for John M. Botts to 
be in the Richmond Congress, it will put its trust in 
chariots and horsemen in vain. We are not in earnest 
for Freedom, as they are for Slavery ; our battalions 
are not on the side of our God, theirs are thoroughly 
and utterly on the side of their God. Therefore we 
stand mystified and irritated, — eighteen millions held 
at bay and repulsed by eight ! 

At last, when it was too late, Napoleon had learned 
the deeper lesson, and he said, " No people devoted to 
its government and institutions can be conquered." 
Devoted, observe ! It is the old word for victims bound 
on altars devoted to the gods ; and Napoleon saw that 
men could be thus sacredly devoted to their freedom, 
thus laid on the altar of their country, and that, when 
they were so, something stronger than heavy artillery 
was at work. So, by his own authority, we must change 
the maxim, and read : The best battalions are those on 
the side of God. 

Another lesson, and one following on this, is, that we 



74 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

must regard the forces in such a contest as this as more 
nearly equal than we are apt to assume. First, we 
must remember that a nation never attacks one of twice 
its population, unless in some way it has a full compen- 
sation for this discrepancy. In the present case, we 
know that, when Sumter was attacked, the South was 
armed, the North unarmed ; in the next place, the re- 
possession of its lost integrity and wrested property 
made it necessary for the United States to take the 
quasi attitude of an invader, and the real disabilities 
of fighting on an unfamiliar soil. Under the circum- 
stances, it would have required an army at Manasses 
of 200,000 men to have made us equal in physical force 
to the Southern army there. Secondly, we are to re- 
member that the very discrepancy in numbers and 
wealth between belligerents, whilst it often begets a 
dangerous sense of security in the stronger party, inva- 
riably leads the weaker to the fullest tension of every 
nerve and sinew, and the levying on every resource, how- 
ever unusual. From these considerations, we see the 
plain natural causes for the seeming paradoxes to which 
attention has been called. We must more and more fix 
it in our minds that size and poiver are by no means 
convertible terms or facts. A hornet is more than a 
match for a wolf. Emerson's epigram reminds us, 

" Foxes are so cunning 
Because they are not strong." 

In nature, weakness itself frequently becomes a source 
of strength ; liability and danger make the eye quicker. 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 75 

the paw more velvety ; wild animals become more spite- 
ful and deadly as they are smaller ; the inhabitants of 
the tropics dread the roar of the lion less than the scent 
of the vinegar-bug. Already we have seen the law thus 
suggested bj^rne out at the South in the effort to poison 
our troops ; in the spying of important facts under flags 
of truce ; in their confinement of the war, so far as they 
could, to the plan of the moccason, — picking off at night, 
ambuscade, masked battery, and the use of our own 
flag to protect themselves and seduce our men into 
their trap. 

When our army has fully learned the lessons, — mor- 
al and military, — the chaplain may preach on his text, 
'' Manasseh is mine" ; it will be ours in a more impor- 
tant sense than if our flag waved over it to-day. 



XIV. 

A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 

There has been a general confusion in the minds of 
both parties as to their historical and moral position in 
this conflict. They of the South have claimed that 
they are revolutionists, and justify themselves under 
the right of revolution. Many of the North have ac- 
cepted the terms, justly reasoning that the right of 



76 THE REJECTED STONE. 

revolution implies an interest, and possibly, as now, a 
duty pledged to prevent it. Revolution depends for its 
dignity and heroism purely upon the worth and justice 
of its cause ; for, as all would applaud a child's resist- 
ance to his father when that father demanded of it some 
dishonorable act, so all would cry shame on the violent 
rebellion against a kind and good parent. Had our 
American Revolution been for the purpose of forming 
our Colonies into a band of robbers and pirates, no Pitt 
would have been found to plead our cause, no Lafayette 
to fight our battles. Revolution, in an unjust cause, is 
only an inauguration of bloodshed and assassination. 

Therefore it is wrongly called Revolution. Revolu- 
tion is a word nearly related to Evolution, and indi- 
cates the normal and healthy progression of the world 
on the prescribed orbit of civilization ; pangs it may 
have, but they are the precious pangs of birth into 
life ; it may wring tears, but each tear falls in blessed 
light, and gives some tint to the bow that halos the 
world. Revolution has marched on with the advan- 
cing world, and with it the fire of war and the cloud 
of sorrow ; but its fire and cloud have been pillars 
leading on to Humanity's Promised Lands. 

Those who have set themselves against these revo- 
lutions — the normal steps of human progression — 
have been always the Pharaohs, Hapsburgs, Philip the 
Seconds, George the Thirds, and Bombas ; — their use 
being always the negative one of making each advance 
more thorough by making it difficult and costly ; their 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 77 

destiny always to fail in the end to suppress tlie new 
germ. So if this were a revolution in the South, this 
nation would now, ere its own majority is reached, be 
standing in the position of the hard Pharaoh and the 
Egyptian taskmasters toward the Israelitish bondmen, 
— and actually in the same relation to the South that 
George the Third so lately held toward itself! 

The South claims that this is the true attitude in 
which the parties stand, and bids us prepare for the 
fate that has ever overtaken the obstinate oppressor. 

On the surface, and for the moment, the South is 
right in this. So long as the position of our govern- 
ment is purely political, — so long as it remains, as 
now, a question of government against government, 
of authority against authority, — we are their obstinate 
George the Third, and on that count we are already 
partially, and in the end will be completely, nonsuited. 

But this defeat will be our real success, for it will 
drive us from our present untenable fortress to that 
which the ages have reared for us, and whose guns 
command the continent and the world. Right com- 
mands all trenches, even those of Liberty ; and to it is 
assigned the power of silencing the batteries that de-. 
fend the liberty of Wrong under whatever mask of 
Independence it may hide. Men fighting for their 
" altars " are strong ; but if on those altars human vic- 
tims lie bleeding, they are weaker than those who 
come to rescue those victims. 

Behind the national army now in the field there 

7 



78 THE REJECTED STONE. 

stands in the shadow another, silent and waiting. As 
yet it is refused. Not until other defeats, and an ex- 
haustion of other reinforcements, will these reinforce- 
ments be called on. They can calmly wait, for they 
are not three-years men, they are eternity men. The 
South already sees them behind there, more terrible 
than an army with banners; they desire to settle the 
war before this second army takes the sword. 

For they know that really the revolution is on our 
side, and that as soon as the nation feels that, and 
acts upon it, the strength of the South is gone. In 
that moment they become the Pharaohs and taskmas- 
ters, and America the revolutionary Israel, bursting 
their fetters, scorning their flesh-pots, and going forth 
in the strength of Israel's God to inherit the land de- 
clared unto their fathers. 

We are the Revolutionists. It was the revolution 
of the American nation that made this war necessary ; 
the South stands relatively where it always stood, and 
where the tyrant has stood since the world began. 
This is true, not in any fanciful or strained sense, 
but in the simplest and most direct sense. Slavery 
has always ruled this country. As soon as a seat of 
power was reared. Slavery assumed it. Its rod was 
extended over the lot of the righteous, and they put 
forth their hands to iniquity. It ruled commerce, it 
expunged the truth of history, it brought its Index 
Expurgatorius on the page of school-book and prayer- 
book. Scholars wrote for it, divines preached for it; 



A EEBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 79 

it clasped the Bible with handcuffs and festooned the 
Cross of Christ with chains. 

Its tyranny was over the North. In the South was 
its throne ; the Southerners were its royal family ; on 
the North was laid its rod of iron. Under it their 
great men bowed low, licking the dust from the tyrant's 
foot, and getting in return his imperial kick. Did a 
minister plead for Liberty ? Slavery commanded that 
he should be exiled from his pulpit, and his family live 
on a crust of bread. So it ordered when Dudley Tyng 
'' stood up for " the Christ of to-day with the scourges 
on his back, and sent to take his place in a Northern 
pulpit a South-Carolinian, to plot against the nation 
whilst in that pulpit. Did any Senator speak for Free- 
dom ? He was avoided as a leper, or stricken down in 
his place. The North was made to plait the lashes 
for its own back, to forge the chains for its own limbs ; 
the men whom she furnished, and who were called 
Presidents and Representatives, were not Presidents 
nor Representatives, but minions and crawling cour- 
tiers, sitting under the footstool of Slavery. None 
could be trusted. Head after head even of the noblest 
was laid low, as if there were a dry-rot among men. 
The dog-star reigned and raged, and the best man 
could scarcely tell whether he would not be a slave- 
hound before night. We had no country. In pro- 
portion as we were real men our country sank and 
hardened about us into a cold dungeon, where we lay 
chilled and chained, with vermin creeping over us. 



80 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Against this Tyrant America at last inaugurated a rev- 
olution. Slowly and with many disparagements the fee- 
ble cause of Liberty prepared for a final struggle. Her 
pulses beat low, her heart-throbs are faint ; she is only 
not crushed because purblind oppression imagines the 
life already, or nearly, ebbed out. But an old fire, 
that was in deep alliance with the central heats of the 
earth, and under which old Wrong had again and 
again shrivelled like a burnt scroll, yet lingered in 
her heart. Anon the flame leapt out at eye and 
tongue ; and despite the play of the engines, despite 
the cold water-jets sent from pulpit and press and so- 
ciety and office, the winds of Heaven fanned that flame 
until the parties were consumed, the political elements 
melted with fervent heat, and Slavery compelled to 
begin the world over again, and rebuild its throne over 
those ashes if it could ! 

It was the noblest revolution the world ever saw 
that placed Abraham Lincoln in the White House at 
Washington ; the noblest, because the first ever known 
upon this planet where the legitimate weapons of Truth 
were alone used. These mighty strongholds yielded 
to the voices, the persuasions, the reasons, of earnest 
and just men ; they were besieged with arrows of 
light, shelled with the bombs of Free School and 
Free Thought. " Love is the hell-spark that burneth 
up the mountain of Iniquity," said Mohammed. So 
also have we found it ; besides those who truckled to 
Slavery with mean motives, there were many fond 



A REBELLION vs. A REVOLUTION. 81 

and simple souls, who could " think no evil," were 
it of the Devil, and these yielded to Slavery that vast 
extent of rope wherewith, when attained, rogues do 
proverbially hang themselves. And thus the revolu- 
tion, without the firing of a gun from the side of the 
revolutionists, had gone on, until the steps of Freedom 
were on the threshold of a liberated and redeemed 
New World. The dayspring from on high had already 
visited us ; the banner which had fallen out of the sky 
to blazon itself only in the scars and stripes on the 
slave's back, or on some weaker nation beside us, 
once more floated up, and promised to symbolize, as 
of old, the streaks of Humanity's advancing day. 

The Southern movement is, then, not a revolution, 
but a rebellion against the noblest of revolutions. It 
is a league of confederates against the peaceful and 
legal evolution of Liberty on this continent. It is 
an Insurrection against a Resurrection. It is Slavery, 
hoary tyrant of the ages, standing before Humanity's 
morning, lifting its bars against the day-streaks, and 
crying, " Back ! back, accursed Dawn, into the cham- 
bers of Night ! " 

The instinct of Slavery has probed this matter very 
accurately. They know that sunrise does not respect 
the protest of owl and bat against it. They have dis- 
covered that the North Star is a kind of Ossawattomie 
star, refusing to stop its light at Mason and Dixon's 
line, sending its incendiary ray far down into cane- 

7* 



82 THE REJECTED STONE. 

brake and dismal swamp, finding many a poor fngitive 
to hold with its glittering eye until he is safe in the land 
of freedom. They know that the sunlight will not re- 
spect the sacred soil, and that their only hope is in see- 
ing that it shall shine through " Bars." They scarcely 
rebelled in time ; they will have hard work building 
the northward wall of their fortress in time to resist the 
arrows of Phoebus. But they are doing their best. 

It is a great mistake, however, for us to suppose that 
they wish to subjugate the North. They have no desire 
to cast themselves straight across the railroad where 
the train of civilization must pass. It is true that all 
they desire is to be let alone. But what does it imply 
to let them alone ? It implies that a nation which has 
heard at the door of its sepulchre the divine mandate, 
'' Come forth ! " and whose hands and feet and face are 
already half divested of their grave-clothes, shall sink 
back again to decay, take again the napkin about its 
face, surrender its tissues again to the worm. There 
is not one healthy movement of a free nation, not one 
word or step, however innocent and unconscious, which 
can by any possibility let Slavery alone. Slavery knows 
they cannot if it is united with them in one nation ; it 
would discover, if separated, that civilization is no red- 
tapist, and that free America cannot let oppression in 
the South alone, more than it can let it alone in the 
Old World. Plutarch tells us that Bessus, the Pseonian, 
destroyed a nest of sparrows with cruelty ; and, being 
reproached with this wantonness, replied, that he de- 



A REBELLION vs. A EE VOLUTION. 83 

stroyed them justly, since they constantly reproached 
him untruthfully with the murder of his father. Thus 
he disclosed his crime. What the twittering of inno- 
cent sparrows was to the parricide, such must forever 
be the natural influences of Liberty — its free schools, 
its free speech, its material progress — to parricidal 
Wrong the world over. Let us not wonder if the 
tyrannies of the Old World smile complacently at the 
attempt of the Southern Bessus to destroy the brood 
of Liberty in America. Freedom will never let them 
alone, will never cease to accuse them, will forever 
proclaim from the house-top the crimes they have com- 
mitted in the cellars and closets. 

When Lieut. Maury came down from the dome of 
the United States Observatory, where for so many years 
he had watched the stars to so little purpose, — never 
having discovered how they in their courses forever 
"fight against Sisera," — to bend all he had learned 
there to the behest of Slavery, the first evidence the 
country had of his treachery was that the light-houses 
all along the coast were darkened. It was well. 'T is 
an exact symbol of what the Confederacy to which he 
had attached himself means. To quench all the lights 
which guide Humanity ; to darken every guiding beacon 
to which the voyagers in the ancient Night are looking ; 
to extinguish every hope lit up on the shores of the 
Future, — that is their design. " Darken the light- 
houses ! " cry the wreckers of Humanity. " Let no ray 
shine out upon the night of oppression I Let the brave 



84 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

ships with their immortal freightage be dashed upon the 
breakers ; for so alone can their treasures gild the coast 
of Slavery ! " 

Shall we now spend our blood, our time, our strength, 
fighting with Slavery for the treasures dragged from 
the waves, — wrecker against wrecker ? In that they 
will be ahead of us ; their drags and nets of spoil are 
longer and better, their eagerness for their prey greater. 
Shall we rekindle those extinguished light-houses ? shall 
we see that, all along the Atlantic and the Pacific and 
the Gulf, the rays of Freedom and Justice to all shine 
out clear and beautiful, marking for every struggling 
bark — for Germany, Hungary, Poland, for all — a path 
of light to a haven of safety and rest ? Then we save 
the wrecker and the wrecked. We kindle lights that 
shine not only outward upon those ready to perish in 
the storm.y waves of Old World oppression, but inward 
upon our more pitiable fellow-men, wandering in the 
darkness of crime, morally wrecked on the rocks of 
barbarism, because America has hitherto failed to pro- 
vide with the light-houses of trade and power those of 
national righteousness and honor. 

Thus and thus alone we cease to be in the seat of 
George the Third, fighting against the bud that by nor- 
mal growth would grow from our side and climb to its 
fruitage. We ourselves become revolutionists against 
our own wrong. We emerge from the ancient king- 
dom of Oppression, and make this a holy war, — a sec- 
ond Revolution achieving for the nations of tlie world 
wliat our first achieved for thirteen colonies. 



EXCALIBUR. 85 

XV. 

EXCALIBUR. 

The centuries as they roll bring no season without 
its fresh laurel for the brow of King Arthur. The sun 
never rises and sets, but it leaves some new gleam of 
light on the jewelled hilt, on the fine-tempered blade, 
of Excalibur, — sword of Arthur, " flower of kings." 

There came a day when out of the boiling sea a 
great hand emerged, holding out this sword, with an 
inscription which declared its name, and its power, if 
wielded by its true king, to cut through iron or steel, 
or conquer the strongest foe. It was given to Arthur ; 
for was not he its true king who stood for justice, for 
honor, for the weak and wronged ? 

The virtue of the sword, as its name indicates, lay 
in its Calibre. It was no larger than other swords ; 
hut its quality was finer. Character is more than 
size, and the sword that defends the innocent and the 
wronged must in the end win the day. So, in the 
hand of Arthur, Excalibur never failed. 

At length the noble King Arthur drew near his end. 
Then went he, with one of his knights, near to the sea, 
and Excalibur was cast therein : again the great white 
hand emerged and caught the sword. The legend runs, 
that soon afterward the king himself was borne away 
to some happy isle by nymphs. But he never died. 



86 THE REJECTED STONE. 

And the prophecies remained, that when his race — our 
race — shall be worthy to receive him, King Arthur, 
the Imperishable, shall return, bringing with him Ex- 
calibur the Unconquerable. 

All along the line of our army — from the Chesa- 
peake to the Missouri — many eyes have strained to 
meet one like thine, Arthur, flower of kings ! We 
have watched night and day, if through the dust and 
smoke of any conflict we could see the trusty Excalibur 
flashing in the light. It is not there : so we gain or 
lose as the fortune of war may decide. With Excalibur 
there is no Chance, but Certainty. 

When we are worthy to receive him ; when we 
stand true Knights of Humanity ; when we have set 
our hearts to strike for the innocent and wronged ; 
when we have bound ourselves in a holy compact, as a 
Legion of Honor, to strike down those who raise them- 
selves upon the weak, — then the royal Soul of our 
race shall rise and return to lead us, and the sword 
that never failed shall carve the path of our victory 
through every "bar," and bring back the thirty-two 
stars as jewels in its hilt. 

As yet the watchers must sit by the foaming, seething 
sea of events, awaiting the great hand, and the sword 
which alone can win the day for America. Not yet, 
not yet. As yet our leaders turn their faces from the 
hunted fugitive, even if forced to receive him ; as yet 
the soldier's sword has not the calibre to carve the iron 
of the slave's manacle. When our Ando-Saxon blood 



EXCALIBUR. 87 

mounts to its royal height, and grasps its final, noblest 
weapon, four million chains will fall, — nay, six million 
hearts, whose drugged blood owns the same fountain 
with ours, will cast off the virus which has maddened 
them, and every State hasten as a Knight to the Table 
where Arthur reigns. 

Why does not this nation at once draw this sword ? 
Why does it not, owning what is whispered in every 
heart, that this war mesins freedom for all or chains for 
all, at once inscribe Emancipation on its banner ? 

No one questions that Slavery is the cause of this 
rebellion. 

No one questions that to recover the Union as it was 

— i. e. with slavery in it — is to recover the elements 
that have led to this collision, and must bring it on 
again whenever the slave interest thinks itself strong 
enough for another effort. 

No one questions but that the only alternative of this 
will be the subjugation of the North in a moral sense, 

— the suspension over the ballot-box of the hair-strung 
sword of Civil War, so that Fear, and not Conviction, 
shall decide every election. 

No one questions that Slavery is the one stain and 
blot which disgraces our flag and cripples our progress, 
and that, but for the protection given it by the Consti- 
tution, the nation should and would have abolished it 
forever. 

No one questions that, by the appeal which Slavery 



88 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

has made to an arbitrament beside the Constitution, 
compelling the temporary obedience to military law 
and military necessity, by which the Constitution itself 
has provided for its own possible suspension, our 
nation has a right to strike at the very root of the 
evil, which, so long as it remained subject to the 
Constitution, it must protect. 

No one questions the position of John Quhicy 
Adams, that the power to abolish Slavery is con- 
tained in the War power. 

Yet in this War law has been as often suspended 
in favor of Slavery as against it ; for it is a direct 
violation of law for one of our soldiers or military 
officers to return a fugitive slave, such return being 
provided for in due form of law, and assigned to 
appointed civil officers. Where, by the growing com- 
pulsion of events, our government has been compelled 
to liberate slaves, it has done so with all the tender- 
ness for the South that a mother might show for her 
pet babe. To-day comes the news that, by a final 
decision, escaping slaves shall be retained, whether 
belonging to loyal or disloyal ; but, as if frightened 
at reaching this dizzy height of resolution, the order 
of the Secretary of War immediately provides that 
any slave wishing to return to the service from which 
he has escaped shall have no let or hindrance ! We 
quote this, not as an instance of unfaithfulness to 
Freedom, but as an example of the infatuation and 
terror which seem to seize upon and confuse all our 



EXCALIBUR. 89 

public men, when they touch this question of property 
in man. Any one whose wits are about him can see 
that, by this order, any treacherous Negro of Gover- 
nor Letcher's household may be bribed into escaping 
to Fortress Monroe, and, after suitable observations, 
" voluntarily return," to give such information as, at 
Manasses, the rebels had, by their own account, to 
pay 8100,000 for. 

Why this timidity ? Why tliis overweening tender- 
ness with human bondage ? One would suppose that 
a system, repulsive to all the instincts of Humanity, 
which can exist only by a toleration almost barbaric, 
would be at once crushed when it became an outl'aw 
and a foe ; but here we are, pirouetting amongst its 
interests as daintily as Mignon among the eggs she 
dare not break. Wherefore ? 

Not because any member of this Administration 
loves Slavery, but because the government fears to 
divide its physical forces ; that is, to alienate certain 
persons in the North and (supposed) in the South 
from the cause of the Union itself, as separate from 
the Slavery question. In fact, for the sake of certain 
persons who, in case of a direct issue between the 
American Union and Slavery, would take sides with 
Slavery. 

But if such men should, unwashed, put forth their 
hands to defend the Union, would it not be a sure 
proof that it would be the old tar-and-feather Union, 
— a Union not fit to be saved ? 
8 



90 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou 
united ! 

Indeed it is, in the eyes of every lover of universal 
Freedom, the higliest mission of this conflict to liberate 
this land from the influence of that vile Northern 
Mephistopheles, the party which has in every way 
fostered the arrogance of Slavery, and encouraged 
the madness of the South, which it is now forced 
to abandon in the conflict to which it has seduced 
that misguided section. The guilt of this rebellion 
is not heaviest on Dixie's Land, by any means. 

These tories would be a drag and a curse to our 
side, if they should espouse it. The hearts of freemen 
the world over would shrink back chilled and dis- 
trustful. 

" We shall march conquering, — not through their presence ; 
Songs shall inspirit us, — not from their lyre; ^, 

Deeds shall be done, — whilst they boast their quiescence, 
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire." 



I 



A FELICITATION. 91 

XVI. 

A FELICITATION. 

In the pecuniary crisis of 1857, Stackpole, on hear- 
ing that a certain bank had gone under, exclaimed, 
" Bully for that bank ! " His astonished auditors 
asked why his admiration was elicited for a bank that 
had just broken. " Broke ! " exclaimed Stackpole, 
amazed at their stupidity ; " well, why should n't it 
break ? What else were banks made for ? But see 
how long it held out, — fourteen days ! That ^s what 
I call a bully bank ! " 

Perhaps on the same principle we should say, " Bully 
for the Democratic party ! " Of course we expected it 
to go for the South in the end. What else was it 
meant for? We were scarcely so green as to expect 
that Slavery's Northern factotum would ever seriously 
pass through a crisis involving a cessation, even tem- 
porary, of such stated religious services as the abuse 
of the North and glowing eulogy of the South, to say 
nothing of having such a means of grace as hunting 
fugitive humanity for our Southern brethren disturbed 
by the " contraband " neology, without breaking down. 
We had from, the first prepared our ears to hear a 
chorus of somewhat cracked voices singing the plain- 
tive melody, "Carry me back!" This was en regie. 
It was what the metaphysicians call the '' structural 
and normal development of its central idea." 



92 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

But, on the whole, we feel a disposition to be duly 
thankful at the result. It cannot be denied that the 
party held out pretty well. It has failed at last, but 
not without losing many of its most talented leaders, 
and being fearfully decimated in numbers. It has not 
even enjoyed the delight of coming out in an open 
licking of its quondam master's hand. "Hypocrisy," 
says the French satirist, " is the homage that vice 
pays to virtue." The South is too shrewd not to see 
that the quasi support of this government under which 
the party conventions have found it necessary to con- 
ceal the poison they would administer, is an attestation 
of the true temper of the masses they hope to control, 
the homage that disloyalty finds it necessary to pay to 
the throned patriotism of the people. 

There is really no cause for apprehending any evil 
from these sitters on the fence. In due time, as we 
have said, the fence will be so sharp, that those who 
try it will be cut in two. But meanwhile it may be 
held as a general truth, that those who have not the 
courage to take a stand on either side will scarcely 
have courage or strength to help our cause, if they 
should adopt it. On looking over the early chronicles 
of our first Revolution, we find that our earnest and 
patriotic fathers had to contend with a vast deal more 
of disloyalty than we have now. The historians give 
us evidence that, even so late as after the destruction 
of tea in Boston harbor, a man might have been 
roughly handled in Boston who should have advo- 



A FELICITATION. 93 

cated a complete separation from England. It was 
some time after the battle of Bunker Hill that this 
(separation) became an avowed object of the war. 
More people in this country are now to be found who 
advocate a complete casting off of the yoke of Slavery, 
than at the same stage of the first Revolution were in 
favor of casting off the yoke of England. And just 
in the proportion that, under the tuition of events, 
our country then rose to greater earnestness and 
bolder steps, the number of sycophant Tories increased 
all over the country. Some of the most fearful scenes 
of bloodshed occurred between the Revolutionists and 
the Tories. 

Now see how much better we are off. Yal. and 
Breck. are protected in Washington by their very 
insignificance. The Tory Conventions, with all their 
pusillanimous talk, are to-day regarded by the best 
men of the party they claim to represent as only 
the hanging out of crape upon its door, to indicate 
that the pulses of the living no longer beat through 
its veins. 

There is one — and only one — way in which these 
Northern Tories and dapper neutrals can work us an 
injury ; and that is by being regarded by our Govern- 
ment at Washington as a party worthy to be considered 
in any of its measures, or of any effort at its concilia- 
tion. Let our government have no Mrs. Grundy after 
whose opinions to inquire in the solemn emergency. 
Let it be brave and earnest, knowing that the great 
8* 



94 THE REJECTED STONE. 

heart of the people moves with it ; knowing, too, that 
in these high magnetic conditions the people see very 
shrewdly into affairs. It is through inattention or in- 
difference that they are usually hoodwinked by politi- 
cians ; now they are neither inattentive nor indifferent ; 
and the demagogues will soon find that it is they who 
are hoodwinked in thinking so. We have no fear 
whatever of the verdict that the people will pass upon 
the contemptible and selfish determination of these men 
to decline all exertion to save the temple of Liberty 
from the flames that threatened to envelop it, and sit 
down to boil their party pots in the fire. 



XVII. 

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 

Honored Sir: — 
From the many conflicting and vague statements 
with which the telegraph fills the air, one seems to 
have obtained the clearness and authenticity of a fact, 
— this, namely, that Garibaldi, the patriot whose 
knightly kiss broke the evil spell which bound the 
Sleeping Beauty of the Meditteranean, whose sword 
has carved a gateway through the age-hardened pris- 
on-walls of Italy, has sent word to America : If this 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 95 

ivar is for Freedom, I come ivith twenty thousand 
men. 

Garibaldi, Sir, is a symbol. The spirit of this age 
has produced him ; and millions in every land recog- 
nize in him the appearance in our age of the Fore- 
runner, — the Voice in the Wilderness that has never 
failed any age, and that cries now as of old, " Prepare 
ye the way of the Lord ; make his paths straight. 
And now also the axe is laid to the root of the tree ; 
every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn 
down and cast into the fire ! " 

There are also in our midst other symbols. Never 
was there a Moses without his Pharaoh ; never a 
John without his Herod. We have a party that 
has gained a certain fictitious strength by Wrong and 
Deceit, and their leaders say : " As soon as this is a 
war for Freedom, we leave you, taking our twenty 
thousand men.^^ 

Between these two symbols you are compelled to 
choose, — Garibaldi and millions of Garibaldini all 
over the world, who can draw no sword but for Jus- 
tice and Liberty, on the one hand ; and, on the other, 
the Pro-slavery politicians who hate Liberty more than 
all else, and whose half-hearted, muttering support to 
tliis government is given only in the ratio of that gov- 
ernment's servility to Slavery. As Garibaldi is only 
known as the hero of European Liberty, so are Val- 
landigham, Richmond, & Co. known only for the ex- 
tent to which they have crawled on their bellies before 



96 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Slavery, and the malignancy with which they have 
sought to wound the heel of Humanity. To accept 
one of these parties is to refuse the other. 

The American people look on very anxiously to 
see to which of these you will turn, and which you 
will consequently make up your mind to alienate. 
This much any one may say for the American people. 
Further than this, each one can speak only for him- 
self; and since, by the nature of our institutions, the 
responsibility for what is done by our government 
must be shared to some extent by the humblest in- 
dividual, it becomes the solemn duty of every man 
who has an earnest conviction to utter it, as it is of 
every man who can strike a blow for his country to 
strike it. 

Now, therefore, I, Sir, the writer of these pages, 
who have seen my native State, the natural garden- 
spot of this country, withered and wasted by Slavery ; 
who have seen its race of honorable and upright men 
disappear before a population of pigmies ; who, exiled 
to the North, have seen there how a nation can turn 
from its great birthright to be warped and ruined by 
receiving into its system a great moral poison, su- 
gared over by an important interest, — have seen there 
the best and bravest men alienated from, and enlisted 
against, a country in which they found no place un- 
less their most sacred convictions were laid down at 
the threshold, whilst the only titles to places of trust 
or power were supple knee-joints and pliant vertebra- 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 97 

tion ; and who, having known these things, arose one 
blessed morning, and, invoking the benison of Heaven 
on a bit of paper which bore the name of Abraham 
Lincohi, cast then my first vote, hoping that it might 
be for the liberation of this country from a great and 
dwarfing crime, — do now implore the President to 
accept the proffer of Giuseppo Garibaldi, and thereby 
proclaim to the world that this country links its des- 
tiny with that of Universal Freedom. 

The only test of our good faith in this is that the 
world shall at once see inscribed on our banner, Imme- 
diate AND Unconditional Emancipation. 

1. It is legal. Your Excellency is sworn to execute 
the laws, therefore you cannot even consider a measure 
that is violative of the Constitution and laws. The 
Constitvition and laws, in providing for possible war, 
do in case of war at once deliver up the government 
to the laws of war ; so that to follow the letter of the 
Constitution in times of war, when military law and 
advantage demanded the contrary, would be violating 
the Constitution. There are times when the Constitu- 
tion can only be obeyed by its temporary suspension 
at tlie command of the universal and necessary code 
which, in common with the organic law of all nations, 
it recognizes. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus, 
and the discussion which followed it, have made it per- 
fectly clear to the people, that in each case where it was 
suspended it would have been unconstitutional to follow 
the ordinary provision of the Constitution. It needs no 



98 THE REJECTED STONE. 

discussion to prove that the same laws which take from 
a traitor the ordinary form and process of law, may de- 
prive an institution that proves traitorous and deadly 
to the country of its ordinary guaranties. It thus be- 
comes simply a question of whether Slavery stands in 
this attitude towards the country. 

2. It is just. The South would destroy the Union 
in the interest of Slavery. The nation must destroy 
Slavery in the interest of the Union. 

In the interest of Slavery the territorial integrity of 
the country has been destroyed, and some arms, forts, 
and money seized. Is that all ? If so, perhaps the 
account between this nation and Slavery might be set- 
tled by the repentance of Slavery, and a return of the 
stolen articles. 

But it is less than a centime of the account which 
this nation holds against Slavery. Years of usurpation 
and corruption, — of insults and abuses heaped upon 
Freedom in whatever form it tried to maintain its slight 
foothold on the continent, — years now summed up and 
culminant in a frantic civil war, involving the daily 
expenditure of millions, the perversion of the means 
and powers of the people, the suspension and lasting 
injury of trade, the reinstating of piracy on the high 
seas, — more than all, the death of vast numbers of the 
youth of America, and the draping of tens of thousands 
of hitherto happy homes ; — all these are in the account 
that this nation has now to settle with Slavery. Can 
they be repaid by the conquest of what forces the South 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 99 

can bring into the field ? Will it be enough if Slavery 
should at length agree to ground its arms until it is 
stronger ? Can it be settled by a truce of one or two 
or ten years ? Is the balance struck, if we have the old 
Union, with the old causes at work in it, to bring forth 
like results in the future ? 

Justice can be satisfied in that alone which satisfies 

Wisdom, — THE UTTER DESTRUCTION OF SLAVERY. In 

no other way can we act up to the lessons which 
Slavery has taught us of its own blasting nature ; in 
no other way can we as a nation obtain that blessing 
for which we have already paid the full price in 
treasure and blood, — the riddance from the accursed 
evil under which we have groaned ever since we 
became a nation. 

This is justice to ourselves ; I have not mentioned 
that higher justice which is due to four millions of 
human beings, cruelly deprived of " the right to life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,'' which our 
nation, in the pure aspirations of its youth, meant 
to secure for all. You are bound to stand by legal 
formulas. Yet I cannot forget what I once heard 
you say, with luminous words, that seemed to shine 
out like responses to the everlasting stars that then 
and there gleamed above you : " Every man that 
comes into the world has a mouth to be fed, and a 
back to be clothed ; by a notable coincidence, each 
has also two hands. Now I take it that those hands 
were meant to feed that mouth, and clothe that back ; 



100 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

and any institution that deprives them of that right, and 
the rights deducible from it, strikes at the very roots of 
natural justice, which is also political wisdom." 

I pray you, Mr. President, to remember that, when 
the laws of war permit you to restore millions to 
those natural rights, every day that they remain 
thereafter deprived of them will be traceable to your 
own door ! 

8. It is merciful. Not only merciful to the slave, 
that he should have this cruel and galling yoke that 
binds him to the plane of the brute removed ; not 
only merciful to us, that the heart-burnings and ani- 
mosities which have rent our land should be laid by 
the eradication of their cause ; not only merciful to 
posterity, that this fearful and irrepressible source of 
trouble and guilt should not be bequeathed them ; — 
but more than to these or to all others, a decree of 
emancipation would be merciful to the South ! 

Up from broad and beautiful plains, worn out and 
desolate ; from undrained marshes and swamps, whose 
very wealth has turned to malaria ; from the locked 
treasures of gold and iron in Virginia and the Caro- 
linas ; from the eighty-five thousand white adults in 
Virginia who cannot read or write, and the even more 
fearful proportions of ignorance in more Southern 
States ; from the young men trained to licentious- 
ness and idleness, whose remnant of strength is to-day 
given to the monster which has ruined them ; from 
the tearful, anxious eyes of mothers, wives, sisters, 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 101 

whose souls know the agony of seeing the son, brother, 
and husband the easy prey of the temptations that 
cannot be escaped, — 0, from all these. Sir, would 
come a response to your decree for Liberty : " Merci- 
ful, most merciful ! " 

There is a weak love that yields and indulges ; there 
is a great and divine love that spares not to smite when 
to smite is best, — ever giving what is wanted more 
than what is wished. An old legend relates that in the 
court of King Arthur was a poor dwarf named Carl. 
He was much pitied by the king and his court, and 
there were stern orders that none should harm the poor 
dwarf. It was also supposed that Carl's mind was de- 
fective, for he every day went about the court with a 
sword, beseeching each knight to cut off his head with 
it. The knights of course would refuse to slay the 
dwarf, who, they supposed, wished thus to be relieved 
of life. At length, on a day, the dwarf stood before 
Sir Gawain, and, with a voice full of earnest appeal, 
and with tears in his eyes, said, " Gawain, canst thou 
not love me enough to smite off my head with this 
sword ? " Sir Gawain was so moved by this, that, in 
an instant, he seized the sword and cut off the poor 
dwarf's head ! 

Poor dwarf no longer ! The evil spell which had 
bound him in his misshapen form, until one of Arthur's 
knights should cut off his head, was now broken, and 
in noble and knightly form and guise Sir Carleton stood 
where poor Carl was before. 



102 THE REJECTED STONE. 

Ah, 't is a great, a godlike mercy which can smite 
its object ! 

And there are dwarfs upon earth, from age to age, 
that only thus can have the evil spell broken, and rise 
to their full stature. Sometimes these dwarfs are 
States. 

4. There is no real obstacle or danger in the way of 
it. I know there are seeming lions in the path ; but 
several pilgrim nations have gone that way, and found 
the lions chained each side, and impotent. We have 
been told that dreadful scenes and vindictive actions 
follow emancipation ; that the Negroes will not labor 
but as slaves, and thus become idlers on a nation's 
hands. The facts bear otherwise. 

There is yet to be shown the State that emancipated 
its slaves, which did not at once rise above the stature 
into which it was before dwarfed. 

It has yet to be shown that Right has ever wronged 
any. 

If, under the formidable circumstances which now 
surround our nation, we should fear the expenses or the 
labors attending such a step, mark how Haiti stands 
ready to bear a hand to the holy work. The Queen of 
the Antilles sits there with her ungathered wealth about 
her, her spices and fruits gilding every wave around 
her shores, awaiting the ten millions of gatherers to 
whom she can yet give a hospitable home. One word 
from you. Sir, and she is a recognized sister Republic. 
Another word, and whilst African troops march on to 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 103 

see that your decree is executed, the aged, the women 
and children, which we can scarcely sustain, are borne 
away to the happy clime where no fevers nor lashes 
await them. 

5. It is the only path to a real success. We justly 
count as a great natural fortress against secession that 
mountain range stretching from Pennsylvania almost 
to the Gulf, — whose brave and hardy inhabitants have 
justified Milton's designation of freedom as '' a moun- 
tain nymph"; — why should we overlook the millions 
of the oppressed stretching into every branch and twig 
of Southern society, who, by the laws of God, are our 
natural allies, unless, by our inhumanity, we drive them 
to the side of the enemy ? Is it best to have 700,000 
fighting men of the South our enemies, when we can 
make them our friends ? We have certain knowledge 
that we have been represented to that class as their 
bitterest foes ; they have been told that our plan was 
to slay a proportion of them and banish the rest. This 
falsehood has been systematically and carefully circu- 
lated throughout the cabins and plantations, and justi- 
fied by the most religious Southerners as a necessity 
of defence. We have done nothing to disabuse the 
slave's mind in this particular. Consequently, although 
here and there a knowing Negro has been able to do 
this for us, the mass has been deceived, and is working 
most devotedly against us. 

At this rate, we shall be defeated, and, as I think, 
deservedly. 



104 THE REJECTED STONE. 

But this war must, as now conducted, prove more 
and more a disheartening one to our people and our 
soldiers. 

As at Manasses our men conquered one battery only 
to find two more opening upon that, we all have a mis- 
giving that a victory over the South would lead to the 
most painful complications. We must hold on to our 
victory after we have got it, for it will have a perpetual 
tendency to elude us. It was, you remember, a difficult 
problem to decide whether the wolf, or the man who, 
having caught him, had to hold him fast, was made 
captive by the exploit. If the cause of the hatred of 
the South to the North and the Nation and to free 
government were removed, their rage against these 
would still remain in the breast of the present Southern 
generation ; but for a generation we could hold them 
quiet. The hatred might even be transmitted to the 
next generation : that too might be held. But in this 
age, as we see in the case of France and England, feuds 
must gradually be worn away before advancing com- 
mercial and other interests ; and, with the root of Dis- 
union plucked up, the third generation at the South, 
and perhaps the next, would thank us for the painful 
surgery with which we saved them, and we should be 
bound together by all natural ties, — ties which Slavery 
alone holds in abeyance now. If this fair prospect 
were ahead, our people would forget in its glory the 
pains and deprivations of the present, and go forward 
animated by that faith which is the substance of things 
hoped for. 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 105 

Moreover, the many disheartening circumstances that 
press upon us now would be removed. To the soldier 
applause is sweet. But we have heard no plaudits 
from the world looking on, — none from England, or 
France, or Germany, or Italy. They cried Brava ! to 
America when our ballots bore you. Sir, to the Capitol ; 
they are silent now that our bayonets would defend 
your right there. We hear from over the seas only 
cold calculations of the probable issue. The civilized 
world stands ready with an equal welcome to either 
party that succeeds. These cold buckets which are 
cast upon a conflict so sacred to us, we have invited, 
by placing the issue on the lowest plane of which it 
was susceptible. Your own last Message did not even 
suggest the word Slavery. 

But this could not be, if, in the face of the world, 
we rose to the standard of right and civilization which 
those very nations have uplifted, and up to which even 
Eussia has come before us. We ourselves have from 
the first held — hold now — the power to decide the 
posture of every foreign nation toward this rebellion. 
Apart from Slavery, England can only see in the South- 
ern movement the presentation to our own lips of the 
chalice we once offered hers. In this she is right. We 
are wrong and presumptuous in any complaint. But 
the civilized world is anti-slavery ; and if in this war 
we did but touch the hem of Liberty's vesture, we 
should be thrilled with an inspiration and sympathy 
which would soon make us every whit whole. We 



106 THE EEJECTED STONE. 

should come in contact with that electric belt which 
binds the hearts of freemen round the world, and up 
from every nation and clime would swell the vivas 
and bravas and hurrahs which would make our every 
soldier thrice a soldier, and cheer us on to a victory 
which every eye would see already written in the book 
of Fate. 

6. It is thus alone that your Excellency can be faith- 
ful to your parole of honor to the United States. You 
have nobly discerned that your oath of office required 
you to preserve the Union and the Constitution at any 
cost. You can hardly fail to remember that the Ameri- 
can people, in electing you over candidates representing 
all varieties of opinion, declared that certain principles 
should prevail in the government of this country, — 
principles to which you had pledged your allegiance. 
When afterward the alternatives of this painful conflict 
or the abandonment of the principles on which you 
were elected were again and again presented to the 
American people, they again and again refused any and 
every compromise of those principles, whatever the re- 
sult might be. You cannot be true to them if you 
compromise them, or fail to defend them. Slavery 
ivould now wrest more than half of this country from 
its allegiance to those principles. Either the Principle 
which placed you in office, or the Institution wliich is 
in deadly grip with it, must fall to the ground. 

Remember, Sir, that the people did not place you 
in office to preserve the Union merely ; that they had 



TO THE PKESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 107 

under Fillmore and Buchanan and Pierce, and they 
might have retained it by electing Breckinridge instead 
of yourself. But not doing so, they declared that the 
Union should be administered in the interest of Free- 
dom, even more than in the interest of peace and con- 
ciliation. To that end your honor stands plighted. 
If any peace shall come in which that end is lost, the 
country is defeated, whatever victory its military arm 
may have achieved. 

Can you. Sir, preserve the United States with Slavery 
therein ? Will Slavery ever be united with the prin- 
ciples you represent? Is not the effort to make it so 
akin to the effort at any chemic impossibility, as the 
union exclusives of fire and water, of oil and alcohol ? 

It is not by presenting to the country its old hulls 
riveted with steel or welded with fire together that 
you can fulfil your trust. It is not by returning us 
a Union in which it will be virtually impossible ever 
to elect another Republican President, for fear of an- 
other insurrection. That would be to restore us a 
country bound hand and foot. If Freedom can alone 
be free by the destruction of Slavery, you cannot in 
honor flinch from signing the death-warrant of that 
system. 

In the ancient Promethean games, each racer bore 
in his hand a lighted torch. The one who first 
reached the goal, with his torch still lighted, won the 
prize. If he came in foremost, but with torch ex- 
tinguished, the later comer who came in with lighted 
torch was declared victor. 



108 THE REJECTED STONE. 

No victory in this war can be a victory to America, 
which does not bring in, bright and burning, the 
torch of Liberty, — ay, of African Liberty as far as 
the people by their last election declared that they 
could and would control and limit it, — which the 
nation gave you lighted to bear in their van. And if 
Slavery has resolved to stake its life on the wresting 
of rights which the people have irrevocably denied it, 
either that life or the verdict of the nation must be 
sacrificed. Which shall it be? The people decided 
the question when they accepted a war with the 
South rather than a denial of their principles, and to 
it, unless their rulers debauch them, they will stand. 
We claim of you that you shall fulfil Frederick the 
Great's definition of a prince as " the first of sub- 
jects," and prove it by being the last to yield the 
standard which they have lifted, and of which you are 
the symbol. 

By proclaiming Freedom to all, white or black, who 
will rally to the defence of our imperilled banner, you 
are told that you will make enemies to yourself and 
the cause of the nation. You may. Sir, make of se- 
cret enemies open ones ; the serpent that now creeps 
in the grass may think it safe to come into the path ; 
but that will be a benefit. It would be not the least 
good of recognizing a direct issue with Slavery, that 
it would be a better detective than Yidocq of the se- 
cret traitors, — who, whilst sentimentalizing about the 
Union, really hold it as secondary and subservient to 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 109 

Slavery, and only refrain from mutiny on the Ship of 
State because they hope to make it a slaver before the 
voyage is over. 

But, Sir, when the half-hearted go, the whole-hearted 
arrive. The Albany and Columbus cliques are a 
cheap price to pay for the Garibaldis with their twenty 
thousands. 

There is, honored Sir, a class of men in this country 
but little known, — men who have been kept out of 
the politics and parties by which the forces of a country 
are usually gauged, because of an enthusiasm for Lib- 
erty and a hatred of Slavery, as intense and devoted 
as the enthusiasm for Slavery and hatred of Freedom 
which the South is showing. They are men who have 
sacrificed the fair prospects of life, the wealth and 
power which usually absorb men, for a truer devotion 
to the cause of the weak and degraded, even against 
the nation when it was wrong. They are men who 
hold their lives at the beck and call of Justice. They 
stand to-day hand on hilt, and await the one word at 
which their swords flash out. 

That word is Emancipation. 

These are not men that require to be waked up, nor 
do they need a long drill ; they have long been wide 
awake, and they were born drilled. Only let that 
countersign which Nature wrote on their hearts when 
they came into the world be uttered, and you shall 
see again the Scourges of God, the Avengers, the 
Men of Destiny, — men born to conquer Slavery, as 



110 THE REJECTED STONE. 

is the eagle to destroy the serpent that coils about its 
nest, — sweeping downward from every plain and hill, 
riding on every wind, until Humanity is avenged, the 
Tyrant and his host overthrown, and Peace bends 
once more her blue vault over a happy land, unflecked 
by a cloud of wrong, glorious with the sun-burst of 
impartial Freedom. 

But, Sir, besides this resource, upon which you have 
not drawn even if you know of its existence, — a 
resource upon which only the Liberty which includes 
the slave can draw, — I believe you would find that 
the people are generally prepared for this measure. 

The very appearances of division and disloyalty in 
the North, which may intimidate our leaders, may 
well be considered indications of a growing and bolder 
feeling among the masses. The appearance of activity 
amongst the compromisers is an indication of an in- 
creasing exasperation amongst the people against this 
rebellion, and a deepening conviction that a blow at 
the cause of it is necessary. The uprising of one 
sentiment is always attended by the excitation of its 
antagonist. 

War is a swift and infallible educator. The old 
mansion yet stands at Perth Amboy where, in the 
midst of the American Revolution, the British Howe, 
having called for a conference with the Americans, 
met John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas 
Rutledge, and proposed to them a grant from England 
of relief from the taxes under which they had groaned, 



TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Ill 

and a full amnesty, if they would lay down their arms. 
How they would have leapt at the offer a little before ! 
At Concord, at Lexington, every American musket 
would have fallen to the ground before such a prop- 
osition. 

Bunker Hill came : we were defeated there. 

But there stands the monument of which every Amer- 
ican is justly most proud, though it stands on the field 
where we were defeated, — for there the gate of com- 
promise with the oppressor closed forever. 

When our fathers began their revolution, it was against 
an unjust tax ; its removal would have closed the mat- 
ter at once. After a few months of war, its removal 
and many other privileges are offered ; but the war 
has unsealed a higher aim. Our fathers replied to 
the compromise proposition : No, this war ends only 

WITH THE ENTIRE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA. 

I think. Sir, that, even at this stage of our second 
revolution against an internal tyrant, the concession 
of an amnesty to Slavery on condition of its grounding 
arms would be with difficulty obtained from the people, 
and that the indignation which a few weeks ago would 
have been allayed by the return of forts and call for 
a convention on the part of the South, rises each day, 
and cannot now be restrained from the natural climax 
that will sweep the source of all our evils and discords 
out of our land forever. 

Thus, and thus alone, can we have an enduring 
peace ; short of this, it is difficult to see even in a 



112 THE REJECTED STONE. 

victory anything but an armistice which shall be the 
armistice of a generation of cowards, evading a task 
because it is hard by adjourning one thrice as hard 
to their children. 

Sir, 't is not often in this world that to one man is 
given the magnificent opportunity which the madness 
of a great wrong has placed within your reach. 

For the first time there stands a man in the Earth 
empowered to break four millions of fetters from the 
hands, minds, and hearts of immortal beings. 

What prophetic tongue can tell the plaudits that 
reach far into the procession of the ages, or of the 
free glad voices which shall deliver from generation 
to generation the name and the story of the lowly 
youth, — the honest laborer, — the President who up- 
lifted a race from the dungeon of Slavery, and cleared 
a nation's path straight to its sublime destiny ! 

But ah ! see what a precipice stretches downward 
from this sunlit summit ! Far happier the rude boy 
with his axe, unnamed, than one on whom Earth's 
millions of eyes shall turn only to remember that he 
could have saved mankind, but faltered and failed. 

Woe to him to whom four millions of slaves shall 
point their shackled hands and say, " There is just 
the one man whom, out of Earth's millions, God elected 
as he who should have power to remove our yokes, to 
raise us from beasts of burden to men, unsealing for 
us the fovmtains of affection, hope, aspiration, which 
the Father has provided as living water for his weary 
children. He swooned on the great moment. 



TO THE AMEEICAN PEOPLE. 113 

Blot out his name, then, — record one lost soul more, 
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, 
One more triumph for devils, and sorrow for angels, 
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God." 

Woe to him whom Posterity, reaping its bitter har- 
vest of agitation and affliction from the dire root of 
all our evils, shall remember only to curse as the one 
who, alone of all men in the history of this nation, 
stood on the moment and the spot where it was legal 
and practicable to pluck up the roots of the infernal 
tree, but who failed to put forth his hand. 

Mr. President ! History stands with the blank scroll 
before her, her pen she holds ready, the next word you 
must dictate. Shall it be Slavery or Freedom ? 



XYIII. 

TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 

Old legends state that once, in the midst of the city 
of Pome, a vast and fearful chasm opened. The peo- 
ple fled in terror to their Oracles, which said, " When 
that wliich is in Pome is most precious shall 'oe cast 
therein, the chasm will be closed." 

Then did each Poman — old and young, man and 
maid — bring of their treasures the richest, and cast 

10 



114 THE KEJECTED STONE. 

therein ; but yet the abyss yawned wider and wider 
in the city's heart. 

At length a young man rose before the council, and 
said, " Romans, what is it that Rome holds most pre- 
cious ? Is it not her Manhood ? " Thus saying, he 
leaped into the chasm, and it closed above him for- 
ever. 

It is not all fable. In every nation the abyss has 
at some time yawned, and closed only by the sacri- 
fices of manhood. 

Under the heart of America it opens to-day. We 
began by casting in this and that treasure. One 
brought his compromise, another his diplomacy, an- 
other his military fame, — still the abyss closed not. 

Is there not, then, in America anything precious 
enough to close it ? My brothers ! it is not the order 
of this universe that an emergency should come to 
brute or man or nation for which — if to pass it be 
lawful — the strength has not been prepared. When 
wings are formed in the egg, and no atmosphere pro- 
vided to sustain them, — when eyes are fashioned in 
the womb, and no sun rises to meet them, — then may 
you believe that a nation worthy to survive is com- 
mitted to an ordeal for which there are no resources, 
or insufficient ones. 

Resources there are in this land, did we only draw 
upon them, which would close this war with the 
closing of this year. 

Into this chasm America's Manhood must leap. 



TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 115 

It is not manhood that fights for its own freedom, 
holding itself ready to " crush with an iron hand " 
others who would seek their freedom. 

It is not manhood that raises a question of rule over 
a question of Humanity. 

It is not manhood that apologizes for every blow it 
is compelled to give to the greatest wrong against man. 

It is not manhood that fears or distrusts the conse- 
quences of doing right. 

When this becomes a war of our manhood, i. e. a 
war for Humanity, then the abyss will close ; not 
before. Many treasures may be swallowed up ere 
that Curtius comes. 

Americans ! for the first time in many years you have 
an administration that really represents you. Your 
President is by history and habit and sympathy one of 
the people ; he has not lived long enough in Washing- 
ton to get on that political tripod which destroys the 
current of connection with the heart of the masses. 
However much individuals may be dissatisfied with 
the present management at Washington, there are 
many proofs that it represents the average status of 
the masses. As we, then, the people, grow, it will 
grow ; as our energy ripens, the government will 
ripen. When Vallandigham is not sent from Ohio, 
his treason will not be tolerated at Washington. Be 
sure that the President will mirror your manhood 
when it arrives. 

Bring forward the strength of your manhood, my 



116 THE REJECTED STONE. 

countrymen, to whatever post of labor you are ap- 
pointed ! We need Ellsworths of the press, "Winthrops 
of the fireside, Lyons of the pulpit. We need not 
only the brave men who shall defend the standards 
when they are lifted up, but earnest hearts who shall 
lift them up, — ay, upon the very towers of Human- 
ity and Freedom. We need a banner on which every 
eye of the earth looking shall see written its freedom 
and joy. We need a school of seers, of prophets, 
who, as of old, shall cry aloud and spare not, showing 
the evils, the inhumanities, which must be conquered 
in ourselves, before we are worthy to fight for, and 
win the victories of. Right over Wrong, of Freedom 
over Slavery. Liberty's arm is not shortened that it 
cannot save, but our iniquities have separated between 
us and that arm. Let every tongue that can speak 
be touched with a live coal from the altar of God ; 
let every pen that can write be dipped in the truest 
blood of an earnest heart ; let every arm that can 
strike nerve itself to smite or be smitten for universal 
Freedom ! Let none stand back, and say, " I will 
wait until this is a noble war, a war for Humanity " ; 
let all enter, and make it a noble war, make it the 
struggle of Humanity. Our President is a Resolution 
which the people have passed. When a fresh and 
higher clause has been added by them, it will be 
repeated by every sword and cannon tliat goes south- 
ward from Washington. Whilst the water rises to 
but twenty feet with the people, let them not expect 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 117 

it to be thirty with their representatives. As we hold 
up their hands, or fail to hold them up, the day will 
be won or lost. 

Forward, then, to the breach ! No war of Manhood 
was ever yet lost. 

The Rejected Stone, whose name is Justice to Man, 
is, in the order of God, once more offered America. 
It is for the people to give it the master-builder, to 
be laid as the Head of the Corner in the future fabric, 
the Republic of Man. 

That day, and that alone, which sees the Nation 
" broken " to the measure of this stone upon which 
it has now fallen, shall see its one Foe, upon which 
that stone shall then fall, ground to powder. 



XIX. 

THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 

It were a sad thing if we should suffer the clangor 
of arms to drown that angel choir that ever singeth of 
" Peace on earth and good-will to men." We should 
indeed meet with utter indignation and execration that 
Devil's-peace, whose white flag now seeks to disguise 
the black one of the pirate and slaver, and to divide 
the forces that rally under that which alone now floats 

10* 



118 THE REJECTED STONE. 

for Liberty and Justice. No war, however bloody or 
interminable, can be so horrible as that peace offered 
us by traitors in our midst, — a peace whose quiet 
would be that of a nation's grave, whose outside repose 
would be but the cover of corruption and loathsome 
vermin. Against sucJi a peace God has forever set his 
angel with the sword of flame. Between him and all 
wrong there can be no peace : the white flag of peace is 
only a flag of truce. The truce may last a month, a 
year, ten years ; but between Justice and Injustice, 
Right and Wrong, Liberty and Slavery, there can only 
be a truce, never a peace. The very field of concilia- 
tion invariably turns out the field of battle : for before 
the song of " Peace on earth ! " comes that of " Glory 
to God in the highest ! " 

But, my friends, though not a thousandth part so 
bad as a false peace, war is always wrong. It is some- 
times, as now, necessary ; but not absolutely, only rela- 
tively necessary, — necessary, that is, only because we 
know not the things that make for our peace. There 
might be a peace at once, a peace consistent with our 
national honor and unity. But the means of it are hid 
from our nation's eyes. Every rebel might be disarmed 
to-morrow. But the victories of Peace require so much 
more courage than those of war, that they are rarely 
won. When we do conquer a peace, however, it will 
assuredly be by the use of a certain sword, which, if 
drawn to-day, would win us a peace to-day, — a sword, 
too, which does not destroy, but makes alive. 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 119 

Gregory of Tours walked near the palace of Soissons 
with Sylvius, the Bishop of Albi. " Do you see any- 
thing on that roof?" said Sylvius. "I see the stand- 
ard which Hilperic the king has set up," replied the 
monk. " And you see nothing else ? " inquired the 
Bishop. " No : do you see anything ? " "I see the 
sword of Divine vengeance hung over that wicked 
house." 

So it proved ; so it ever will prove. When human 
endurance is at an end, the sentence of Heaven is close 
at hand. Such sentence is indeed pronounced through 
human lips, and executed by human hands ; but wlien 
in an extremity, or by the necessity that knows no law, 
or rather obeys the highest of laws, a people is driven 
to enact some mighty change in society, they consum- 
mate the decree of the Universe. By such revolution 
God fulfils the oath he has sworn, that every wrong 
shall be overthrown, and the kingdoms of this world 
become the kingdom of his Christ forever. 

It does not require eyes so keen" as those of the old 
French bishop to see the hair-strung sword of retribu- 
tion hung over the palace of King Secession. While 
the North is now sending its young men to die on 
the battle-field, the sword yet sleeps in the scabbard by 
our side at sight of which rebellion would ground its 
arms. That sword is Emancipation. Fear or hate 
will inevitably draw it in the end : how much better 
that Justice and Mercy should draw it now! The 
common sense of the nation has already rendered the 



120 THE REJECTED STONE. 

verdict that Slavery is the cause of this trouble, yet 
we have forborne to touch that institution. Not only 
is Slavery the historic cause of the rebellion, but it is 
the one thing that alone makes it practicable at the 
South. Slavery is itself essentially, and in its most 
quiet condition, a rebellion. It is a rebellion against 
the laws of this Universe, — a guilty defiance of God 
and man. So it stood in reason before it bore its bit- 
ter fruits in practice. Nettle-roots sting not, but 'tis 
their law to produce the nettles that do sting. Hence 
Slavery has not departed from its natural law in now 
seeking to lift its " bars " against " our banner in the 
sky." Its whole spirit and tendency is to engender 
that arrogance and self-aggrandizement which have cul- 
minated in this rebellion. To enslave four millions is 
a suitable training for the enslavement of thirty. But, 
as we have said, it is not only the ultimate cause of 
Secession ; Slavery alone renders the present attitude 
of the South possible. It is only because a slave can 
be left at home to "till the soil, that the white man is 
able to bear arms in the army. Should it be once 
announced that every slave was, in the eye of the coun- 
try, a free man, each Southerner would have to hurry 
home to be his own home-guard and his own home- 
provisioner. Such a measure would disband the South- 
ern forces, and pin every rebel to his home. Their 
armies would soon "fold their tents, like the Arabs, 
and silently steal away." Every slave in the South, 
whether building breastworks or not, whether belong- 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 121 

ing to a loyalist or not, is, by the wealth and strength 
he produces in that section, really arrayed against the 
North. Some of us are hoping for an insurrection 
down there to demoralize their army. It will, never 
come. Three fully armed watchmen can secure a hun- 
dred slaves from consultation or rising. Hercules will 
not come and take the wheel out of the rut for us. 
Nay, more, as long as we fail to use that weapon, it is 
one whose hilt may at any critical moment be grasped 
by the South and wielded with terrible effect. The 
Republic of Colombia placed a sword in every slave's 
hand, and proclaimed freedom to each and all who 
should rally to its defence. The South may follow 
their example, and thus, by proving itself more the 
Negro's friend than the North, may turn our natural 
allies in their midst to our active and bitter foes. 
Dear as Slavery is to the South, the hope of conquer- 
ing the " Yankees " is dearer. Should they adopt 
this measure, we should be inevitably defeated in this 
war. 

I feel profoundly impressed that the country should 
at once and most seriously look this matter in the face. 
In the rapid march of events, how soon may this sure 
weapon be carried beyond our reach ! I therefore 
propose to look below the surface of this matter, and 
examine some of those popular errors concerning the 
policy of emancipation which have been industriously 
circulated and fostered by the defenders of Slavery, 
and which may yet paralyze our. arm in the great 



122 THE REJECTED STONE. 

moment of its opportunity. These errors pass daily 
from tongue to tongue on our streets, in su-ch phrases 
as, " the horrors of insurrection," " the scenes of St. 
Domingo"; and we are constantly asked, " What could 
we do with the Negroes ? " 

It is a little singular that Slavery has so long been 
able to keep up in the popular mind an idea that 
emancipation would bring all manner of evils and 
complications in its train, when the facts are so em- 
phatically otherwise. The dictum is complacently 
announced in our midst, whilst nearly every civilized 
nation is at this moment enjoying the beneficent re- 
sults of emancipation. Let us see : — 

On the 10th day of October, 1811, the Congress 
of Chili decreed that every child born of slave parents 
after that date should be free. 

On the 9th of April, 1812, the government of 
Buenos Ayres declared the same free who should be 
born after the 1st of January, 1813. 

On the 19tli of July, 1821, the Congress of Colom- 
bia emancipated all the slaves who had borne arms 
for the defence of the Republic, and provided for the 
entire emancipation in eighteen years of all its slaves, 
— 280,000 in number. 

On the 15 til of September, 1821, Mexico granted 
immediate and unconditional emancipation to all its 
slaves. 

On the 4th of July, 1827, the State of New York 
emancipated at once its 10,000 slaves. 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 123 

On the 1st of August, 1834, Great Britain emanci- 
pated, at a cost of 1100,000,000, all the slaves in her 
West Indian possessions, — 800,000 in number. 

Here, now, are instances of every variety of emanci- 
pation, — immediate, gradual, conditional, uncondi- 
tional. And it has not only yet to be shown where 
and when any scene of violence or danger followed 
these decrees, in even a single instance, but it can be 
shown that each of these countries rose after them in 
the national scale as to security and general prosperity. 
This lias been particularly the case in the West Indies, 
about which so many lies have been so industriously 
circulated. There, on one glorious night, 800,000 
slaves knelt in their chapels, watching for Liberty's 
midnight-morning ; and when the midnight hour rang 
out, they arose freemen. The morning's dawn found 
each one at his usual post of labor, and ready to 
continue to earn the legitimate produce of the island. 
There were scenes of joy such as might have drawn 
the gaze of hovering angels, there were such touching 
scenes as must attend the casting aside of grave-clothes, 
the emergence from the sepulchre of a people who 
have heard a Messiah saying, " Come forth ! Unbind 
him hand and foot ! " But there was not one scene 
of that rebellion and retribution which had been antici- 
pated, perhaps because merited. 

But we hear much of the " fearful scenes of St. 
Domingo." I have reserved mention of this island, 
because it contains for us a higher lesson tlian the 



124 THE REJECTED STONE. 

practicability of emancipation (which it also teaches), 
even the formidable results which may follow an at- 
tempt to thwart the policy of emancipation when any 
exigency commands it. There is, indeed, a possibility 
that ''the scenes of St. Domingo" may be repeated 
upon this continent ; and it is not hard to foretell on 
whom the responsibility of their occurrence shall rest 
in such an event. 

On the 28th of March, 1790, the National Assembly 
of France decreed that " all free persons " of St. Do- 
mingo should have the right of suffrage. This was 
passed at the solicitation of the free colored residents 
of the island, and was meant to confer the privilege 
of voting upon them. The planters became excessively 
indignant at this grant of political privileges to the 
free Negroes, and denied them the right to avail them- 
selves of it. Og^, a mulatto, claimed the exercise of 
the right at the head of an army. A war-cry was the 
response. At length the planters, after the death of 
six thousand men, acquiesced, the French Assembly 
meanwhile inserting the word colored in their decree 
of suffrage, so as to make its grant to the free Negroes 
unmistakable. Thus far there was no attempt by any 
party to free the slaves ; indeed, the free Negroes had 
helped at vanous times to suppress the insurrection 
of slaves against those very planters with whom they 
were themselves contending. In September, 1791, the 
French government revoked the decree of suffrage to 
the free Negroes. It was doubtless as an expedient, 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 125 

for on the 4th of April of the next year the decree 
of rights was again issued, and three Commissioners 
with six thousand troops sent by France to St. Do- 
mingo to enforce it. Thereupon the planters inaugu- 
rated a conspiracy to place their island in the hands 
of England. The French Commissioners, hearing of 
the approach of English troops, and finding that they 
must resist an assault from that power with about 
21,000 troops, on three fourths of which (they being 
the militia of the country) they could not rely, at 
once emancipated the slaves, — 500,000 in number, — 
a measure which France or England may yet, in the 
same way, compel the United States to adopt. The 
British evacuation of St. Domingo took place in 1798. 
Then Toussaint I'Ouverture, the black Washington, 
arose, and on the 1st of July, 1801, the independence 
of St. Domingo was declared. 

Let it be remembered that up to this time there were 
no " fearful scenes " in St. Domingo, except such as 
were occasioned by a mad rebellion of the white 
planters against the just decrees of their government. 
And each fresh horror came of their mad conspiracy 
to transfer the island to foreign powers. The slaves, 
after their manumission by the French Commissioners, 
went on for the most part working patiently, as before, 
seeking no political privileges, until this quiet was 
changed by the conspiracies of the planters to betray 
them, now to this nation, now to that, — to any that 
would re-enslave them. When their liberties were 
11 



126 THE REJECTED STONE. 

assaulted, eight years after they were legally gained, 
by Napoleon, these men showed themselves worthy of 
those liberties, by defending them as brave men have 
done in every age and land ; and instead of such de- 
fence being attended witli barbarities on the part of 
the Negroes, the whole history of the Haitian Republic 
down to this day is a continuous record and attestation 
of French and English and Spanish treacheries and 
cruelties, — perfidies and cruelties persistent and al- 
most incredible, — and of heroism, patience, and only 
too much generosity, on the part of the Negroes. 

Indeed, there never was a siege or campaign of one 
of these white nations which was not followed by out- 
rages for the cruelty of which the records of insurrec- 
tion furnish no parallel. In even the insurrection of 
Nat Turner, in Virginia, the violation of woman 
formed no part. In the plan of Denmark Vesey, in 
South Carolina, there was a stern prohibition against 
any wanton outrage, and not a blow was aimed but 
would have been essential to liberation. No woman 
or child was ever slain, except it was certain they 
would be able to alarm neighborhoods, and defeat the 
plan of insurrection ; and the blow, wherever it fell, 
was swift, the death instant, where in other lands 
vindictive tortures have been resorted to. The motto 
of the Negro, in the few instances where he has struck 
for his freedom, has always been Liberty^ never Ven- 
geance. In this regard, the mildest race in the world 
has been most infamously slandered, or absurdly mis- 
understood. 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 127 

As far as any minds are haunted by the question, 
" What shall we do with the Negroes, should we free 
them ? " we have to say, that we should do with them 
just what was done in the seven cases of modern times 
already named, in each of which the same question, 
" What shall we do with them ? " cleared away like a 
phantom before the dawn of emancipation. The meas- 
ure was followed in each case by no evil, and by every 
happy result. With the South, indeed, as with others, 
the palaces of the few might shrink, but the huts of the 
many would expand to homes of comfort. Immense 
plantations would become smaller, but the little patch 
of ground that scarcely sustains the poor white of the 
South would be enlarged. And with this whole false 
state of society would pass away the effeminacy, the 
licentiousness, the arrogance, and general barbarism 
which are the legitimate brood of Slavery, and which 
have shown their power to make the fairest and broad- 
est country of the earth a cage of unclean birds. 

There is one lesson that the Negro temperament 
easily learns, and one which a long training has con- 
firmed, — that is obedience. He may presently be- 
come a blind insurrectionist, and his wrath sweep like 
a conflagration through the land : we shall then see 
that it was a false mercy to the South, and a great 
injustice to the whole country, that he was not (as he 
may be now) transformed into a controllable power 
and subject of the nation. 

As far as their able-bodied workmen arc concerned, 
there is plenty for them to do. Our broad lands north 



128 THE REJECTED STONE. 

and south need their labor as much as ever. As far 
as the many aged and the children and invalids — 
who' at present, without risk, could not remain in the 
South — are concerned, we should be more fortunate 
than any emancipating nation ever was before. Haiti 
sits at tliis moment waiting to help this great work, 
willing to send her every sliip to our shores and bear 
to her shores every Negro who will go. The Queen 
of tlie Antilles sits on her throne of plenty, — her 
shores gilded with richest fruits, calling only for hands 
to gather and turn them into wealth, — offering every 
colored man who will come the bounty of a free voy- 
age thither and a land grant on his arrival. With 
one word of recognition, this government can secure at 
once the peace and safety of both Haiti and America.* 

Is it not melancholy that nations so generally wait 
to be driven by hard physical necessity to do great 
and just deeds ? The just measure which, if done 
from a high motive and in calmness, produces pure 
and beneficent results to all, if done afterward, under 
the compulsion of fear or as a measure of vengeance, 

* It is almost unpardonable, indeed, that our government has not already 
spoken that word, and the failure may be attributed chiefly to the fact that 
we have nobody whose business it is to attend to such matters. It may be 
said, just here, that it is high time that another department in our govern- 
ment should be recognized and formally created, one whose duty shall be 
a suitable attention to the Slavery question, and the momentous and com- 
plex affairs growing out of it day by day. We need a new Cabinet officer 
for this. It is of infinitely more importance than the Bureau for the Indians. 
The government has already drifted hopelessly, and without any certain 
policy, amidst thejragments and snags of this half-wrecked institution, one 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 129 

brings those results fearfully alloyed with difficulties 
and dangers. The work that God gives us to do, we 
do a great deal better than it will be done if we send 
it back for him to do. What the French Assembly 
might have written peacefully on parchment, but re- 
fused, God soon after wrote with a pen of iron, and 
in blood-red ink, on every street in Paris. When we 
leave it to Providence to do our work. Providence 
always brings with it a mixture of hell-fire, to teach 
the foolish world how much better it is to do its own 
work. The abolition of Slavery, which is almost in- 
evitable during this war, would, if accomplished at this 
moment, unselfishly and grandly, simply because the 
war power has brought the nation to the one glorious 
moment when it can legally abolish it, be a peace meas- 
ure : erelong it will be a fierce and fearful war meas- 
ure, almost as painful to the party forced to use it as 
to those at whom it will be aimed. 

Ah, if this nation but knew, in this its day, the things 
that belong to its peace ! Now they are hid from its 
eyes. Hid, — but not because they are not just before 
us, not because it is too late to avail ourselves of them ; 

policy in Missouri, another in Virginia. Let the peril be provided for at 
onoe. It may be, before long, seen that the issue of our country's life or 
death rests with the Slavery question; already it is generally felt that, 
whilst there is the utmost need that we should have a policy on the matter 
to which we can adhere, there is a painful confusion of thought among the 
people, and action among their rulers, as to what is, or should be, the atti- 
tude of the government toward that institution. Let our government re- 
assure the public, by making it certain that we shall not be wrecked on this 
rock, for want of a special pilot to watch and warn. 



130 THE REJECTED STONE. 

they are hid because our eyes are weak and averted, 
not having the courage to look squarely before us. 
Glorious as our national uprising has been, it has not 
yet reached that pure and peaceful elevation that, with 
a wave of the divine wand of rectitude, could sway 
without a blow the muttering Caliban of Rebellion. 

An old man lately looked upon the pale, dead face 
of his slain son, and said, " Slavery, then, has thus 
entered my own door." Into how many doors has it 
come ! Already within six months some ten thovisand 
young men of America have been sacrificed on the 
unholy altar of human bondage. Already stalwart 
arms are idle, trade languishes at her marts, and the 
cry of the poor at the North begins to answer that of 
the oppressed at the South ; together their voices cry 
to God and man, asking : Men and Brethren, what 
great good has this institution ever done, what good 
is it now doing or expected to do, that would make 
it desirable to sacrifice one single human life to it, 
much less thousands of lives ? What is there in Slav- 
ery that would make it well to sacrifice to it the bread 
of one weeping child, much less the living of thousands ? 
Why, why this cruel tenacity to an unmitigated evil, 
and one which alone makes this war possible ? Does 
it make the slaveholder a good man, or a wise arid 
peaceful and happy man ? Does it make freemen no- 
ble, brave, devoted to the right ? Does it add to the 
nation's wealth, culture, progress, or happiness ? Ig 
it not an unmitigated and blighting curse, now heavy 
upon every man, woman, and child in this land ? Look, 



THE GREAT METHOD OF PEACE. 131 

then, America, into the pallid faces of thy slain young 
men ; follow from home to home where the destroying 
angel has passed ; listen to the growing cry for work, 
already changing to the fiercer cry for bread ; see par- 
alyzed trade and closed schools ; and tell us what there 
is in human oppression so sacred that its blood-splashed 
chariot-wheels must not be stayed ? 

We all see plainly that our government is led by the 
people, and that the people must first pass the great 
acts which must guide their rulers. This has always 
been the case where any great and solemn crisis has 
arrived to a nation, involving high moral principles. 
Diplomatists and politicians never strike a great blow 
for the right except from the constraining force of 
public opinion ; the wrong they do is spontaneous ; if 
they must do right, they take care to explain that it 
is from military or political necessity ; but they seem 
never to fear that a measure will not be supported 
because of its unrighteousness. The heart of England 
was absolutely all aflame and seething against Slavery 
in the West Indies, whilst the government was cold 
and impassive. One day the petitions for emancipation 
were so numerous and bulky, that it took six men to 
carry them into Parliament. Then Parliament stirred 
a little. One day afterward, it was reported that 
800,000 women of England — one for every slave in 
the Indies — were knocking at the door of Parliament, 
and demanding the emancipation of the slaves. Then 
the Government sent them word : " Go to your homes ; 
the slave is free." 



132 THE REJECTED STONE. 

There is no reason why Americans should not be as 
earnest and persistent as their English relatives. There 
is no reason why we should not have our six men to 
carry in our petitions for emancipation into the next 
Congress, and our 800,000 or 4,000,000 women besieg- 
ing the government for that peace which can alone 
repose on justice. 

Many a young man is asking in these times. How 
can I best befriend my country ? Young man ! You 
can befriend it by letting your manhood utter itself in 
word and deed ; by bearing with your whole weight, 
howsoever you can make it felt, for the liberation of 
the slave, which now means the liberation and peace 
of your country. Many a noble woman yearns to serve 
in some post of duty, and complains in her secret soul 
of the hard fate that seems to shut her out from places 
of active usefulness. Women ! Remember those who 
were '' last at the cross and earliest at the sepulchre," 
— remember those 800,000 women who wrung from 
England that bright First of August, — the Coronal 
Day of Nations, — and swear a sacred oath to-day that 
your prayer shall be heard in the Capitol of this nation 
imploring liberty and justice for the slave, — the things 
that belong to our country's peace. 



THE END. 



■1 18 1882) 



Cambridge: Printed by Welch, Bigelovv, & Co. 



TIE REJECTED STONE: 



OH 



l^fSURRECTTON vs. RESURRECTION 



AMERICA 



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